The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we are to continue in the right way today, we must consider something of the nature of the human being and how human beings are part of historical evolution. First of all we consider the fact that human beings have the power, or the gift, of the intellect. What does this mean? It means that we are able to form ideas. For the moment we need not reflect on where these ideas come from. The life of thought is with us wherever we are in waking consciousness. And we also feel, for instance, that when we walk, stand or do anything else, we are guided by our thoughts, by something which exists first of all in the mind. Later on we shall discuss if this really is the case. For the moment I merely want to establish what fills the conscious mind in everyday life. It is our thoughts. But when it comes to the world of thought as such, the matter is really quite different. And we shall not understand how human beings really relate to their thoughts unless we first consider the true nature of the world of thought.

In reality we are always, wherever we are—whether sitting, standing or lying down—not only in the world of air and light and so on, but also in a world of surging thoughts. You will find it easiest to get an idea of this if you look at it like this: When you walk on earth as an ordinary physical human being you are also a breathing human being, walking in a space filled with air. And in more or less the same way you move in a space filled with thoughts. Thought-substance fills the space around you. It is not a vague ocean of thoughts, nor the kind of nebulous ether people sometimes like to imagine. No, this thought-substance is actually what we call the elemental world. When we speak of entities which are part of the elemental world in the widest sense of the word, they consist of thought-substance, actual thought-substance. There is, however, a difference between the thoughts flitting around out there, which really are living entities, and the thoughts we have in our minds. I have spoken of this difference on a number of occasions. In my book due to be published shortly, and which I mentioned yesterday,¹ you will find further references to this difference.

You may well ask yourself: If there is such an elemental principle out there in thought-space and if I, too, have thoughts in my head—what is the relationship between the two? To get the right idea of how your own thoughts relate to the thought-entities out there you have to visualize the difference between a human corpse which has been left behind when someone has died and a living person who is walking about. The kind of thoughts you have to consider in this respect are the kind you gain from the world you perceive with the senses when in waking consciousness. Our own thoughts are actually thought-corpses. This is the essential point. The thoughts coming from the world we perceive with the senses and drag around with us when in waking consciousness are thought-corpses—thoughts that have been killed. Outside us they are alive, which is the difference.

We are part of the elemental world of thought in so far as we kill its living thoughts when we develop ideas on the basis of what our senses have perceived in the world around us. Our thinking consists in having those corpses of thoughts inside us, and this makes our thoughts abstract. We have abstract thoughts because we kill living thoughts. It is really true that in our state of consciousness we walk around bearing thought corpses which we call our thoughts and ideas. This is the reality.

The living thoughts in the outside world are certainly not unrelated to us; there is a living relationship. I can demonstrate this to you, but do not be frightened by the grotesque nature of this unaccustomed idea. Imagine you are lying in bed and it is morning. You can get up in two different ways. Ordinarily, you are not aware of the difference between them because you are not in the habit of making the distinction, and anyway you do not pay attention to this particular moment of getting up. Nevertheless, you can get up out of habit, without thinking about it, or you can actually produce the thought: I am now going to get up. There are people, however, who get themselves up out of sheer habit, and yet there is just a touch of the idea: I am going to get up now. To repeat, many people do not make the distinction, but it can be made in the abstract, and the difference is enormous. If you get up without giving it a thought, out of sheer habit and training, you are following impulses given by the Spirits of Form, the Elohim, when they created human beings as dwellers on earth at the beginning of earth evolution. So you see, if you switch off your own thinking and always get up like a machine, you are not getting up without thought having gone into it, but it is not your own thought. The form of movement involved in getting up involves thoughts—objective, not subjective, inner thoughts; these are not your thoughts but those of the Spirits of Form.

If you were a terribly lazy person who really did not want to get up at all, if it really was not in your nature to get up and you would only get up on reflection, against your nature, out of purely subjective thought, you'd be following ahrimanic tendencies; you would be following only your head, and therefore Ahriman. As I said, the distinction is not made in ordinary life. And everything else we do is really done in the same way as our getting up. Human beings truly are made up of two entities which can be outwardly distinguished as the head and the rest of the body. The human head is an extraordinarily significant instrument and much older than the rest of the body. The construction of the human head is such—I spoke about this last year²—that the basic shape arose during Moon evolution, though the head has, in fact, come down through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. Humans would look quite different if they still had the shape they had during Moon evolution.

In very general terms we might say people would look like spectres, with only the form of the head emerging somewhat more clearly, which was the original intent. The rest of the body was not meant to be as visible as it is now. These things have to be considered, otherwise we cannot really understand human evolution on earth. The rest of the body was meant to be purely elemental by nature. In the head, everything would come into effect which has come down as Moon existence transformed by earth; let us call it ‘a’. But this inherited Moon existence transformed by earth is the actual human being, for the human being is really a head with only a very insignificant attachment.

The rest of the human being—let us call it ‘b’ and to begin with let us simply consider it to be this elemental, airy principle—is a manifestation of the higher hierarchies, from the Spirits of Form downwards. The right and only way of seeing the human being is to realize that everything shown here as ‘b’ has been created by the cosmic hierarchies. The human being which has evolved from the time of Saturn emerged against the background of the cosmic hierarchies. If you visualize the essential nature of the parts of the human being which are not head—you must think of it as all spirit, or at least all air—then you have the body of cosmic hierarchies (drawing on the board).

However, luciferic seduction entered into the whole process of evolution. The outcome was that this whole, more elemental, body condensed to become the rest of the human body, which of course also had an effect on the head. This will give you an idea of the true nature of the human being. Apart from the head, which is their own, having come from earlier evolution, human beings would be an outward manifestation of the Elohim if their bodies had not become sensuous flesh. It is entirely due to the temptations of Lucifer that this outward manifestation of the Elohim has condensed to become flesh.

Something very strange has arisen as a result, an important secret to which I have referred a number of times. What has happened is that the human being has become the image of the gods in the very organs which are normally called the organs of his lower nature. This image of the gods has been debased in human beings as they are on earth. The highest principle in human beings, the spiritual principle coming from the cosmos, has become their lower nature. Please, do not forget that this is an important secret of human nature. Our lower nature, which is due to Lucifer's influence, was actually destined to be our higher nature. This is the contradictory element in human nature. Rightly understood, it will solve countless riddles in the world and in life.

We are thus able to say: In the course of human evolution man has, thanks to the luciferic element, made the part of him that should be constantly emerging from the cosmos into his lower nature. Many historical phenomena will find their explanation if you consider that this was known to the leaders of the ancient Mysteries, people who were not as facetious, cynical and narrow-minded as people are today. Certain symbols taken from the lower nature and used in the past, symbols that today are merely seen as sexual symbols, are explained by the fact that the priests who used them in the ancient Mysteries did so in order to give expression to the higher reality of the lower nature of man.

You can see how sensitive we have to be in dealing with these things if we are not to be facetious. Modern people slip easily into facetiousness, because they cannot even imagine that there is more to human beings than mere sensuality—which, in fact, is the luciferic element in our higher nature. Thus historical symbols are easily given entirely the wrong interpretation. It takes some nobility of spirit not to interpret the old symbols in a lower sense, even though they often can be interpreted in that way.

With this, you will also begin to realize that if thoughts from the elemental world come to us—they are living thoughts, not abstract, dead ones that come from the head—they must be coming out of the whole human being. Mere reflection will not achieve this. Today the idea is that we only arrive at our thoughts by reflection. Today the idea is: If human beings will just reflect, they can think about anything, providing the things they want to think about are accessible. This is nonsense, however. The truth is that the human race is in a process of evolution, and the thoughts developed by Copernicus, for example, or Galileo, at a particular time could not be reached by mere reflection before that time. You see, people fabricate the thoughts they have in their heads. But when a thought which marks a real change arises in world history, this thought is given by the gods and through the whole human being. It flows through the human being, overcoming the luciferic element, and only reaches the head out of the whole human being. I think this is something you can understand. In certain ages, particular thoughts just have to be waited for and expected; then human beings are not merely reflecting, nor is something conveyed through their eyes or ears, but inspiration comes from the world of the hierarchies and it comes through the whole essential human being, which is the image of the hierarchies.

If you consider this, some of the things I said yesterday can also tell you great deal. In the present age, from the fifth post-Atlantean age, we are living much more inwardly than before—in ancient Greek times, for example, when the outer environment provided much more that was spiritual. This inwardness of life relates to the process in which thoughts come up through the whole human being. In earlier times, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the relationship between human beings and the gods was much more of an exterior thing; today it has become much more intimate. Human beings are always associating with the gods; their heads do not normally know anything about this, however, because they only hold human thoughts, or rather the corpses of thoughts.

Human beings always associate with the gods as whole human beings, and this association is more intimate today than it was in the past. Even the nature of clairvoyance is such that the relationship to the gods and to disembodied spirits is altogether different from what it was before. When a human soul associates with spirits or with the dead, the association is a very subtle one. It is more or less similar to the way in which our own thoughts associate with our own will in the soul. It is very intimate, and this intimacy belongs to the present age. It corresponds to the essential nature of human beings here on earth and also to that of the dead, of those who are going through the gate of death to enter the world of the spirit at this time. This intimate association has become possible because in some ways the relationship between man and cosmos has changed. If the relationship which some human beings have to the world of the spirit comes to conscious awareness, it shows itself to be a much more intimate one, even today, than it was before.

Certain abilities had to be lost, so that this intimate association with the gods could develop. During the times of ancient Greece and Rome and after, right into the Middle Ages, people still had direct perception of spiritual elements in the world around them; as I said, they did not merely see physical colours in the way we do today, or hear physical sounds, but perceived spiritual elements in colours and sounds. They were also able to use the element which for us has turned into chaotic dreams as a means of entering into the world of the spirit and they did so in a way that was much less subtle than is possible today. It was relatively easy to approach the Spirits and the dead in the past. Today our ordinary dreams no longer have the same quality, though this did continue well into the Middle Ages. Some people still had it for a long time afterwards. Those earlier people also perceived as in a dream all that happened around them in the elemental thought-world of which I have spoken. They were not yet cut off from that surrounding world, and their own essential nature still extended into it. People were aware of this and acted and behaved accordingly.

Today these things are, of course, considered to be an old superstition. Yet when something significant occurs in connection with this ‘old superstition’, modern science does not know what to do with it. Let me give you just one example: Cimon, a well-known historical figure, had a friend called Astyphilos who knew how to interpret dreams. Astyphilos was able to interpret dreams intellectually. When Cimon had dreamed of a vicious, yapping dog before the Egyptian campaign, Astyphilos forecast his death, saying: ‘You have dreamt of a vicious, yapping dog; you will die in this campaign.’ The story was told by Horace.³

A modern sage who has written about dreams, though in materialistic terms, does of course believe that Cimon had an ordinary dream and Astyphilos was a mountebank who interpreted dreams. Yet he also makes a strange comment: ‘Chance willed it, however, that his prophesy came true.’ I could show you books which give irrefutable evidence of prophesies which have come true,⁴ but people will say: ‘Chance willed it.’ This is one of many examples. People imagine that the inner life has always been the same as it is today and that there has been no development in the inner life of man.

Thus the outer senses perceived more of the spiritual, and at the same time the relationship with the surrounding elemental thought-world was, in a way, based more on images. Dreams still had the quality of images which pointed to the future. Just as memory relates to the past, so the images pointed to the future, though not in the same way, of course. The constitution of the human soul was therefore entirely different in the past. Blurred dream images came into everyday sensory perception, images which nevertheless related to real happenings in the elemental world. We might put it like this: The physical world of sensory perception had not yet condensed and become solid and mineral in quality. Everywhere colour and sound still sparkled with spiritual qualities. At the same time people still had the ability to live in waking dreams, and these were reality in the elemental, objective world of thought. Then humanity was deprived of this relationship with the outside world in order to establish and strengthen human freedom; the inner life became more intimate in the way I have described.

There is something we must consider which is most important. We can use the powers of the normal intellect to reflect on the phenomena belonging to the world of nature, but we cannot use this intellect to reflect on social phenomena. People believe that the way of thinking which enables them to reflect on the events of the physical world can also be used to establish social laws and political impulses. They are actually doing so now, but the laws and impulses are of correspondingly poor quality. The kind of thing you find in Roman history, and you would also find it in later history if it had not all been turned into romance—for instance, that Numa Pompilius took his inspiration from a nymph called Egeria in certain matters of state⁵—indicates that in those days people appealed to the gods when matters of state had to be dealt with. They would not have thought it possible to create political structures merely by thinking about them. Today the idea is that individuals are not able to do this, but if you multiply the individual by so and so many times, then it can be done. So if you have a modern democracy and an enlightened parliament, three hundred heads are able to achieve by reflection what a single head cannot do, of course. This goes against one of Rosegger's statements which I have quoted a number of times: ‘One's a human being; if there are several, you've people; if you have lots of them, they're beasts!’⁶—but surely it is not what you would do in practice! And just imagine what the whole enlightened modern world would say if news were to get around—not in the old form but in a new one—that Woodrow Wilson had taken his inspiration for some decree or other from a nymph.

These things have changed, even if they are not exactly more intelligent. It will, of course, be difficult to grasp, but it is something we have to realize, that real and appropriate ideas concerning social structures will only come when people appeal again to the spirit. They are not forced to do so, and the form will be different, but this appeal to the spirit must be made again. Otherwise, everything people produce by way of political principles, social structures and ideas will be mere nothingness. There has to be living awareness of the fact that we live in the world of elemental thought and have to take our inspiration from it.

People are still able to laugh about such things today. But humanity will have to struggle through pain and suffering to gain awareness of inspiration in the creative sphere of the social order. Here we have an even more subtle indication of something that will become more and more necessary for humanity.

People will have to realize that they must now prepare themselves to make a connection again with the world of the spirit, so that they may bring into the kingdom of this world a kingdom which is not of this world but is present everywhere in the kingdom of this world. Only then will salvation come for a social sphere where chaos now reigns.

It will, however, be necessary for people to overcome the unease and reluctance they feel about concerning themselves with the intimate relationship between man and world. In the more important fields of human activity, people will have to go more deeply into the nature of this relationship as it was in the fourth post-Atlantean age. This will give them the necessary orientation so that they can really see how human beings related differently to the world around them than they do now. It is possible to study this, but we must overcome this mythology—mythology in the bad sense—we call the study of history today. We need to consider historical reality, going back at least as far as the Mystery of Golgotha, and this will be possible if the study of external history is enriched by the study of spiritual science. People will simply have to make the effort to enter into a study of spiritual science. The whole way of thinking, of course, is such nowadays that people often feel everything to be utterly grotesque when they begin to enter into the world of the spirit; people instinctively think that things will look just the same there as they do in the physical world. All they are prepared to accept is that they will find a more refined, subtle form of this world, and they fail to understand that they will find it completely different, so much so that even the smallest detail will come as a surprise.

Let us assume a modern philosopher, your normal kind of university professor, were to have some kind of Inspiration⁷—it would be a small miracle, but let us assume such a miracle were to happen—so that for five minutes he were in a position to ask the world of the spirit if he was a true philosopher with a true inner vocation. What do you think the answer would be? He would be given an image; this would be the right answer, only it would need to be correctly interpreted. This is really true; I am telling you something which has happened innumerable times. The answer would be that the philosopher is given ass's ears. And the interpretation of this would be: ‘I am indeed a real philosopher.’ This is not a joke. The point is that some ideas mean one thing in the physical world and exactly the opposite in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is not a distinction to have ass's ears; in the spiritual world, having ass's ears as an image is worth much, much more than the highest distinction ever awarded to a professor of philosophy. But imagine someone who is only used to the physical world and who suddenly—as I said, by a miracle—becomes clairvoyant and sees himself wearing ass's ears. He would think he was being made a fool of, that he was being taken in. And he would immediately call this an illusion. Things are different in the world of the spirit, down to the last detail, and it is necessary to translate everything we meet there, in order to find the right correspondence and interpretation in the physical world. I was not simply telling a joke when I spoke of those ass's ears. If you read the writings of ancient times you will find the dreams dreamt by philosophers to convince them of their inner vocation. The dream I have described is quite typical of that kind of thing. Philosophers had to see themselves with ass's ears to be convinced of their vocation.

People will inevitably be surprised and taken aback when they want to get acquainted again with the specific nature of the spiritual world. Reading The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459,⁸ you will sometimes feel that the grotesque things said in it are enough to make you laugh. Yet they are deeply significant, for the path to which the work refers should not be considered in a sentimental way, but with a certain superior humour.

As I have said, later times also have events analogous to Numa Pompilius receiving instruction from Egeria. These things are no longer made known, which is, of course, the reason why history has become mere conventional fiction. Consider, it was as late as the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century when Jacob Boehme⁹ had his profound Intuitions; truly great, tremendous grand visions which contained Intuitions from an earlier time. His followers included many people who lived in later times. One of the last to be consciously a follower of Jacob Boehme was Saint-Martin.¹⁰ He based himself entirely on Jacob Boehme, especially in his book Des erreurs et de la vrit, though it is a somewhat dematerialized Boehme. Still, he had enough of what had come through from older times to realize: If one wants to have ideas concerning social structures, if one wants to have real, effective political ideas, these must not merely be thought up, they must have come from the spiritual world. In his book, Saint-Martin presents not merely ideas concerning the world of nature and its progress, and of history and its progress, but also quite specific political ideas. Today, when states are the only kind of political structure, one would call them ideas on the political state. His discussions do, however, include one idea of special significance, and it is characteristic that this is in the forefront of his political ideas. Saint-Martin refers to ‘original human adultery’, which he says took place at a time when sexual relations did not yet exist between male and female on earth. He is therefore not referring to adultery in the usual sense. He means something quite different, something he keeps deeply veiled, and to which The Bible refers with the words: ‘The sons of the gods saw how beautiful these daughters were and they took for themselves such women as they chose.’¹¹ This event brought chaos to the world of Atlantis; there is also a mysterious connection between this and the way in which human beings had made their elemental spiritual nature sensual. All one can do is hint at the event which Saint-Martin calls ‘original adultery’; he, too, was merely hinting at it.

It is evident that Saint-Martin realized that to consider politics, one must not merely take account of outer human situations, as people do today, but find a way of going back to earlier times when one had to go beyond the world of the senses and into the world of the spirit if one wanted to know anything about the human being. The principles of political thinking must be evolved out of the world of the spirit. Saint-Martin still knew this at the end of the eighteenth century—he only died in 1804, and what he said in Des erreurs et de la vrit has also been translated into German. It is not without interest to say this, because a certain cleric who is against we who want to serve the life of the spirit here in Dornach—he lives quite near to here¹²—has said that in the face of all this folly people should remember plain, simple Matthias Claudius, and he quoted a verse by Claudius in his support.¹³ It was Matthias Claudius, however, who translated Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la vrit in order to make the spiritual science of that time accessible to his people. The gentleman in question therefore demonstrated his colossal ignorance where Matthias Claudius is concerned, quite apart from the fact that he quoted only one verse; if he had quoted the preceding verse he would have contradicted himself. Still, he was satisfied with the one verse which he thought suited his purpose, which was to quote something against anthroposophy.

As late as the eighteenth century, Saint-Martin knew that if we are to have fruitful political ideas there has to be a bridge between human thoughts and the spiritual influences which come from higher worlds. No previous century has been as godforsaken, really, as the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is important to realize this. Nor was any earlier century so vain and so proud of being godforsaken. Still, if people were to read about the statesmanship advocated by Saint-Martin—I think all those clever people who now get together and want to guide the destinies of the world would feel their stomachs turn. For it is the tendency today to get to know as little as possible about the real world around us. It is, of course, possible to erase from our minds the thoughts which come from the living spirit, and we can decide to work only with thought-corpses. People's actions do not relate to this, however, but become part of a web of living thought. And when people with thought-corpses refuse to enter into those living thoughts, the outcome will be chaos. This chaos has to be overcome, which calls for the clear insights of which I have spoken before, as well as in these lectures. It does, however, require a complete change of direction from what is considered to be right today and the absolute ideal.

Above all, this change of direction will have to come soon. And it would be best if it were to come right now and be as widespread as possible in the field where educators are appointed for both young and old. There is no other field where humanity has entered as deeply into materialism as it has in education.

Let me conclude by presenting a thought which will be occupying us in the days ahead, for it is very interesting and very important for all humanity. I would like to present it in such a way, however, that you will be able to turn it over in your own inner mind for a few days. You will then be better prepared to consider this thought.

The children who are born today—we must consider them in the knowledge that the outer form is withering and splitting up, as I have shown in these days. But deep inside is the true human being. This no longer comes to outward expression in the way it did until the fifteenth century. We will have to get more and more used to the thought that, especially in the case of children, the inward human being cannot be fully revealed by the way people present themselves, nor by the way they think and the gestures they make. In many respects these children are something quite different from what comes to outward expression. We even know extreme cases. Children may appear to be the worst of rascals and yet there is so much good in them that they will later be the most valuable of human beings. But you will also find many children who are very good and not the least bit bad, never putting a finger in their mouths nor thumbing their noses at people. They will study well, perhaps be good bank managers one day, or good schoolteachers according to present-day ideas, and indeed good lawyers. But—forgive these harsh words—they will not be good people, because they cannot achieve inner harmony between themselves and the true world around them. It is specifically in the field of education and training where the principle must be established that people are very different inside today from what they appear to be. It will therefore be necessary in future to appoint teachers on entirely different principles. To be able to see into something which is inside and does not come to expression on the outside requires something of a prophetic gift. Examinations for prospective teachers must therefore be organized in such a way that candidates with intuitive and prophetic gifts do particularly well. Candidates who do not have such gifts must be made to fail their exams, however great their knowledge.

The last thing we do today is to consider the prophetic gifts of people who are to become teachers. We still have a long way to go with regard to many things that will have to be done. Yet the course of human evolution will eventually force people to accept such principles. Many of the materialists of our age would, of course, consider it a crazy notion to say that teachers should be prophets. But it will not be for ever. Humanity will be forced to recognize these things.

• 1. Riddles of the Soul. See Note 1 of lecture 5.
• 2. In a lecture given in Dornach on 21 October 1916, for example. (GA 171. Not available in English.)
• 3. Plutarch also teils the story in his Life of Cimon.
• 4. For example, Rudolf Steiner's library in Dornach includes a book by Max Kernmerich called Prophezeiungen, alter Aberglaube oder neue Wahrheit (translates as: “Prophesies, an old superstition or a new truth”), Munich 1911; it includes prophesies which have since come true.
• 5. Numa Pompilius (probably 715–673 BC) succeeded Romulus as King of Rome. See Livy's History of Rome, Book 1, Chapter 19.
• 6. Peter Rosegger (1843–1918), Austrian poet and novelist. Some of his works were in the Styrian dialect, which also applies to the quoted sentences.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner generally made careful distinction between ‘imagination’ in the ordinary sense, using the ordinary German terms for this, and ‘Imagination’ as the ability to see images of spiritual realities, which is generally achieved in the course of initiation. The same applies to the terms ‘Intuition’ and ‘Inspiration’. The three should be treated as technical terms in the field of anthroposophy. The convention in English versions of his works has become to use capitals for the higher faculties described by these words.
  
  In this text, capital first letters are put where Steiner is using them as technical terms.
• 8. See Note 3, lecture 3.
• 9. See Note 2, lecture 3.
• 10. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803) took up German at the age of 49 so that he might translate Jacob Boehme's writings into French. His Des erreurs et de la vrit ou les hommes rappels au principe universel de la science par un Ph(ilosophe) inc(onnu) of 1775 was translated into German by Matthias Claudius in 1782. A new edition of the translation was published by Der Kommende Tag in Stuttgart in 1925.
• 11. Genesis 6:2. Revised English Bible.
• 12. This was the parish priest at Arlesheim, which is next to Dornach. For further details see Necessity and Freedom (GA 166), translated by P. Wehrte, the lecture given in Berlin on 25 January 1916, Anthroposophic Press N.Y.; and ‘Things of the Present and of the Past in the Spirit of Man’ (GA 167), MS translation C42, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 13. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), German poet and writer. The ‘verses’ in question are the third and fourth verses of his evening hymn Der Mond ist aufgegangen.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

It lies in the nature of current scientific observations that the phenomena we want to dedicate today’s lecture to are basically not much talked about by current natural science. Yet every human being should feel that sleep is something how is placed among the phenomena of our life as if life’s greatest riddles are presented to us through it. Surely people always must have felt the mysteriousness and significance of sleep when they spoke of sleep as the ‘brother of death.’ Today, we have to limit ourselves to speaking of sleep as such, because the coming lectures will repeatedly lead us back to the contemplation of death in many ways.

All that man in a direct sense counts as belonging to his soul experiences, all imaginations that from morning to evening surge up and down, all emotions and feelings which constitute man’s soul drama, all pain and suffering, and the will impulses as well—all of it sinks down, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when the human being falls asleep.

Some philosophers might doubt themselves, so to speak, when they talk about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the spirit that reveals itself in human nature. Yet, they have to admit that even if it had been firmly nailed down by definitions and ideas and showed itself to be well researched, it basically seems to disappear into nothing within the course of each day.

If we look at the manifestations of our soul life in the way one usually does so scientifically and also amateurishly, then we basically must say that these are extinguished during the state of sleep; they are gone. For someone who only wants to observe the physical expressions of the soul, the human being becomes on deeper reflection, so to say, all the more a riddle. Because the actual bodily functions, the bodily activities, continue during sleep. Only what we usually call the ‘soul’ discontinues.

The question then arises as to whether one is speaking about bodily and soul matters in the right sense when one includes what appears to be extinguished on falling asleep, when actually the soul aspect is included to the full extent. Or, if already the ordinary observation of life, apart from Spiritual Science or anthroposophical observations, could show us that the soul is active and proves to be effective even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wants to gain some clarity about those concepts, or one could say, if one wants to observe the manifestations of life in this field in the right sense, one must place exact terms before one’s soul.

By way of introduction, I would like to mention in advance that on this topic as well, Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is not in a position to make generalisations of the kind that people love to make today. If today we talk about the nature of sleep, then we will only talk about the nature of human sleep. In the last lecture, with regard to other fields, we have touched on this many times—Spiritual Science knows very well that which outwardly manifests itself in the same way, as this or that other appearance by different beings, can have quite different causes in the respective beings. We have indicated that this applies to death, to the whole spiritual life and to the formation of the spiritual life of animals and human beings. Today, it would go too far to also talk about the sleep of animals. Therefore, we want to say in advance that all we talk about today applies only to the sleep of human beings.

Through our consciousness, we can speak about soul manifestations within ourselves—anyone can feel this—because we are conscious of what we imagine, want, and feel. Now the question must arise—and this is extremely important particularly for today’s observations—whether we may readily combine the definition of consciousness as we use it for the ordinary consciousness of a human being in the present with the concept of the soul or the spirit in a human being? First, to express myself more clearly about these concepts, I like to draw a comparison. A man might walk around in a room and cannot see his own face in any spot in that room. The only place he can see his face is where he can look into a mirror. His own face appears as an image in front of him. Isn’t there an enormous difference for man whether he just walks around in a room and lives within himself or whether he sees what he expresses of this living also in a mirror image? It could probably be so with human consciousness in a somewhat extended way. The human being could, so to speak, experience his soul life—and he would only become knowledgeable or conscious of this soul-life itself, the way he lives it, when it confronts him like a mirror. This could very well be. Thus, we could say, for example, that it is quite possible that the human soul life continues regardless of whether the human being is awake or asleep. But that the waking state consists of the fact that the human being perceives his soul life through a mirroring, let’s say first of all, through a mirroring within his physicality and that he cannot perceive it in the state of sleep because it cannot be mirrored in his physical body.

Although we have not yet proven anything with this, at least we would have gained two concepts. We could differentiate between the soul life as such and becoming conscious of the soul life. We can think that for our consciousness, for our knowledge of the soul life, as we currently stand in our everyday human life, everything depends on us receiving the mirror image of our soul life through our physicality because if we do not receive this, we cannot know anything about it. We would then be wholly in a sleeping state. Now that we have gained these concepts, let us try to place the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little before our soul.

Someone who is really able to observe life, will feel very clearly, and one would like to say, will ‘behold’ how the moment of falling asleep truly proceeds. He can perceive how the imaginations, the feelings weaken in their brightness, diminish in their intensity. But this is not the most essential. When a human being is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order through his self-conscious Ego in his whole imaginative life, whereby he summarises, as it were, all ideas with his Ego. For at the moment when we in our waking life would not summarise all our ideas with our Ego, we would not be able to lead a normal soul life. We would have one group of ideas that we would relate to ourselves and call our concepts and another group we would look at as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a split in their Ego, which for people today would be a state of sickness, could have such a tearing apart of their imaginative lives into different areas. For a normal person it is essential that all his ideas are in perspective related to a single point: the self-conscious Ego.

The moment we fall asleep, we feel distinctly that, at first, the Ego will be, so to speak, overwhelmed by imaginations despite these growing dimmer. The ideas assert their independence; they live an independent life. Single clouds of ideas, as it were, form within the horizon of consciousness, and the Ego loses itself in imaginations. Then man feels how the sense perceptions like seeing and hearing and so on become blunter and blunter, and finally, he feels how the will impulses are paralysed. Now, we must point out something clearly observed by just a few people. The human being feels furthermore, as he sees things with defined borders in his daily life, that at the moment of falling asleep, something asserts itself like a feeling of being locked up in a vague fog, which occasionally makes itself felt as cooling, or with other sensations in certain parts of the body: on the hands, on the joints, on the temples, on the spine etc. These are feelings that someone falling asleep can very well observe. They are, one would like to say, the kind of trivial experiences that one can have every evening when falling asleep if one wants to.

Better experiences are had by people who, through a finer developed soul life, more precisely observe the moment of falling asleep. They can then feel something like an awakening despite falling asleep. What I am about to tell you now, can be told by anyone who has acquired certain methods of really observing these things, because it is a common human phenomenon. The moment people feel like an awakening when they are slipping into sleep can really be described as follows: something like an expanding conscience, like morality, wakes up in the soul. This is indeed the case. This is particularly shown when people observe their soul concerning what they have experienced the previous day and with which they are satisfied in their conscience. In the moment of moral awakening, they feel this especially clearly. At the same time, this feeling is quite the opposite of the feeling during the day. While the feeling during the day shows itself by things approaching us, one who falls asleep feels as if his soul is pouring itself out over a world that is now awakening. This mainly includes a relaxation, a pouring out of feeling over that which the soul, through itself can experience in relation to its moral inner being as if through an expanding conscience. Then it is a moment of inner bliss, which appears to be much longer for the one falling asleep, when it is about dwelling on things with which the soul can agree. There is often a deep conflict when the soul has to reproach itself. In short, the moral human being who, during the day, is repressed through the strong sensory impressions, relaxes and feels himself very distinctly when falling asleep.

Everyone who has acquired a particular method, or maybe even only a feeling concerning such observations, knows that at this moment a certain longing awakens, which we could describe like this: One really wants this moment to extend into the indefinite, that it would never end. But then comes something like a ‘jolt’, a kind of inner movement. For most people, this is very difficult to describe. Of course, Spiritual Science can describe this inner movement quite precisely. It is, as it were, like a demand that the soul makes on itself: You must now relax even further; you must pour yourself out further. But by making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself for the moral life in its surroundings. This is like throwing a small drop of colour into water and dissolving it: the colour can still be seen at first. But once the drop distributes itself throughout the water, it pales more and more and finally, the colour display as such stops. So it is when the soul is just beginning to swell and live in its moral mirror image where it can still feel itself, but the feeling stops once the jolt, the inner movement, occurs, as the drop of colour loses itself in the water.

This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just like a natural scientific observation is exactly accessible to everyone. If we thus observe the process of falling asleep, we can certainly say that the human being intercepts, as it were, something when falling asleep that, afterwards, he somehow can no longer be conscious of. If I may be allowed to use both of my earlier constructed ideas—the human being has, as it were, a moment of parting from the mirror of the body in which the manifestations of life appear to him as mirror images and because he has no other means to mirror what otherwise is mirrored by the body, the possibility to perceive himself, ceases.

Again, it is possible to perceive in a certain sense the day’s happenings—if one does not want to be altogether stubborn and obstinate regarding what relates to the soul and the effect of what moves into an vague darkness. I have already pointed out in another context that someone forced to memorise this or that, i.e., learn things by heart, can do this much more easily if he sleeps on it more often, and that depriving oneself of sleep is the greatest enemy of memorisation. The possibility and the ability to memorise more easily even returns once we have slept on an issue and not want to learn something by heart in one go. This is also the case with other activities of the soul. However, we could convince ourselves very easily that it would be impossible to learn anything at all, to acquire anything when the soul is involved, if it weren’t for the inclusion of sleep states among our life states. The natural conclusion that has to be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from time to time from our physical body, in order to gain strength from an area that is not within our body, because the respective strengths within the body are being worn out. We must imagine that when we wake up in the morning from sleep, that from the state in which we were then, we have brought along strength to develop abilities, that we could not develop if we were constantly shackled to our bodies. This is how the effect of sleep shows itself in our ordinary nature, when one wants to think straight and not be obstinate.

What shows itself in general when one pauses in ordinary life, and for which one needs some good will to hold one’s life phenomena together, is shown very clearly and precisely when man goes through developments that are able to lead him to a real beholding of the spiritual life. Here I would like to elaborate on what occurs when a human being has developed the forces that lie dormant within his soul in order to reach a state in which he can neither perceive with the senses nor comprehend with the mind. This will be followed up in more detail in the lecture How does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World,¹ where the methods will be quite comprehensively covered. Right now though, we will highlight some of the experiences that a person, truly practising such exercises is able to have that endow his soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, and through which he can look into the spiritual world, which is not an object of speculation, but for someone who perceives with his senses, it is just as much an object as colours and forms, warmth and coldness, and sounds. How to attain true clairvoyance has already come to light in previous lectures. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist of a person bringing out of himself something that he has within himself, gains other organs of perception, jolting upwards, as it were, over the soul, as it is in its ordinary state, and thus perceives a world that is always around him but which cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, the first thing that changes is his sleep life. Anyone, who has done their own real spiritual research knows this. I would now like to talk about the very first stage of change in the sleep life of a person who is actually clairvoyant and engaged in spiritual research. The first beginnings of this possibility of spiritual research do not make the person appear very different from the normal ordinary state of consciousness because a person who performs these exercises, as we shall discuss later, will at first sleep like any other human being and is just as unconscious as anyone else. But the moment of waking up will show something very special to the one who has performed spiritual exercises. I will now describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are based on facts.

Let’s assume that a person who is practising these exercises is thinking very hard about something that another person could also be thinking about. He tries, maybe because he has a very difficult problem in front of him, to exert all his mental power to get to the bottom of it.

Perhaps he’ll be like a schoolboy: his mental power just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem. This could definitely happen. If he has now already obtained through his exercises more possibilities to experience the inner states of the soul in connection with the physical state, he will certainly feel something quite peculiar when he finds himself incapable to do something. Unlike usual, he perceives a resistance in his physical organs, for example in his brain. He properly senses that the brain puts up resistance against him, just as we feel resistance when we try to drive in a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. The brain then begins to gain a reality. The way man normally uses his brain, he would not feel it as if he were using an instrument, as is the case with a hammer, for example. A spiritual researcher feels his brain, he feels himself independent in relation to his thinking. That is an experience. But if he can’t solve a task, he feels that he is no longer able to carry out certain activities that he must perform when thinking. He feels very clearly that he is losing power over the instrument. This fact can be experienced very precisely.

If the spiritual researcher sleeps on the problem and then awakens, it will often happen that he feels up to the task without any further ado. But at the same time he also feels precisely that prior to waking up he has done something, that he has worked on something. He feels that he had been able to set something within him in motion during his sleep, that he had caused an activity. During the waking state he was forced to use his brain. He knows that. He can do nothing but use his brain when he is awake. But he was no longer able to use it properly, because—as I have described—it resisted him. During sleep, he feels, he is not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a degree of flexibility without using the brain that was too tired or otherwise too heavily occupied. Now he feels something very peculiar: he perceives the activity that he has performed during sleep, albeit not directly. The Lord gives to his own, but not in their sleep. The spiritual researcher is not saved from having to solve his problem now in the waking state. It may come easily to him, but normally it is not so, and particularly not with things that simply must be solved by the brain.

Hence, the human being feels something that he has not known before in the sensory world—he senses his own activity, which presents itself to him in vivid pictures, in strange pictures that are in motion. It is just as if the thoughts he needs were living beings who would enter into all kinds of relationships with each other. Thus he senses his own, let’s call it, ‘mental activity’ that he undertook during sleep, like a series of pictures. This feeling is difficult to describe, as one is stuck in it in a quite peculiar way and has to tell oneself, ‘This is you yourself!’ But, on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling very clearly from oneself, in the same way as one is able to distinguish a physical movement one makes from oneself. Thus one has pictures, imaginations of an activity performed before waking up. And now one can notice, if one has learned to watch oneself, that these pictures of an activity that was performed prior to waking up, connect themselves with our brain and turn it into a more flexible, more useful instrument, so that one will be able to complete something, which one could not do before because of a resistance, for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one won’t really get behind the secret of sleep. Thus, one feels that one has not performed an activity as in the awake state, but one that served the restoration of certain things in the brain which were worn out. The instrument has been restored in a way that was not possible before. One feels like a master builder of his own instruments.

The feeling during such an activity is significantly different from that during a daytime activity. The feeling one has about the day activities is comparable to copying something from a template or a model. There I am forced to follow the picture in front of me with every stroke or dot of colour. In regard to the things that appear as pictures at the moment of waking and that are, as it were, an illustration of an activity during sleep, one has the feeling of inventing the strokes, of creating the figures out of oneself, without being tied to a model. With such an occurrence one will have, as it were, intercepted what the soul did prior to waking up: one has intercepted the activity of brain regeneration. Because sooner or later one realises that what feels like a kind of coating the brain organs with what one remembers as figures is nothing other than a restoration of what has been damaged in the course of the day. One really has the feeling of being a master builder working on oneself.

Basically the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person is only that a spiritual researcher just perceives these things, whereas an ordinary person cannot pay attention to them and does not perceive them. The same activity that the spiritual researcher undertakes is performed by every human being, but the normal person doesn’t catch the moment when the organs are restored by the activity that takes place during sleep.

Let’s take such an experience and compare it to what was previously said about an increase in bluntness and dullness, and a reduction in brightness of the daily imaginative life at the moment of falling asleep. This latter phenomenon can only be viewed in the right light if one either frees oneself from today’s highly suggestive concepts of the world view that believes itself to be firmly based on natural science, or by actually accepting the available results of contemporary natural research. For example, in brain research, and according to the results of natural research, people who think more precisely can do nothing but acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that recently a popular book was published in which basically everything that has to do with spiritual life and the sources of spiritual life was presented wrongly and completely without any insight. But in this book, The Brain and the Human Being, by William Hanna Thomson,² a lot of smart things are said. It deals in particular with modern brain research and with many other things that are presented—for example, as I also have more often pointed out—with symptoms of fatigue, which are quite instructive. But I have already explained that muscles and nerves cannot get tired in any other way than through conscious activity. As long as our muscles only serve an organic activity they cannot become tired. It would be bad if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles needed rest. We only become fatigued when we perform an activity that is not innate to the organism—such as an activity that belongs to the conscious life of the soul. Thus one has to say; if the soul life was born out of the human being like the heart activity, then the immense difference between fatigue and non-fatigue could not be explained. The author of the book therefore feels compelled to acknowledge that the soul relates to the physical no differently than a rider relates to his horse, i.e., that it is completely independent from the physical. This is an enormous concession from a person who thinks like a natural scientist. One could get very strange feelings if, forced by contemporary natural research, one has to confess to oneself that the relationship between the soul life and the body life must be imagined as being roughly the same as that of a rider to a horse. That is, according to the image that people had of a centaur in earlier times, when they still looked deeper into the spiritual realm.

It is not apparent that the author of the book would have thought of this, but again this thought comes to mind from the natural scientific conception, and one gets the feeling that such ideas stem from times when a certain clairvoyance still existed for many people. Today, however, certain imaginations about centaurs seem to be more compatible with what a gentleman once told me: He said:

‘The Greeks watched the Scythes, who came from the North, and other rider clans, perhaps when they emerged from a fog. They could not distinguish the shapes clearly, and so they thought that these had grown out of the horse.’ A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is just contemporary natural scientific research that pushes for an acknowledgment of the independence of the soul from the physical.

One thing we can hereby definitely notice, and we can follow such things best if we recall certain occurrences before our soul that are not commonplace, but still exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher knows how that common man in the country, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin, a language he had never really used and which one could prove he had only heard once in Church when he was a little boy. This is not a fable, but a reality. Of course he did not understand anything of it, when he had heard or recited it. And yet it is true. From this, the idea should be formed in every human being that what affects us in our environment contains something in addition to what we absorb into our normal consciousness. Because what we absorb into our ordinary consciousness is often dependent on our education, on what we comprehend and the like. But not only what we can comprehend unites itself with us, but we have in us the possibility to absorb endlessly more than what we take up consciously. We can even observe in every human being how at certain times he has ideas, that were not strongly noticed at the time he experienced them here or there, so that he may not remember them at all. But through certain things they re-appear, and may even place themselves into the centre of his soul life. We really have to acknowledge that what constitutes the extent of our soul life is endlessly more than what we can receive and embrace with our day consciousness. This is extraordinarily important. Because in this way our attention is steered towards something inside of us that can really only make a slight impression on our corporeality because it has hardly been noticed, and then again it lives on in us. In this way, we are pointed to the foundations of our soul life, which should actually exist for every reasonable person. Every rational person should tell himself that, what is in the world around him for his consciousness while he is consciously looking at the world, is basically dependent on the organisation of his sensory organs and on what he can understand. And no one is entitled to want to limit reality by what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to want to deny the spiritual researcher that behind the physical world a spiritual world exists, simply for the reason that man is only allowed to speak about what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and he is never allowed to judge what he cannot perceive. Because the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sensory organs. For this reason one should never —in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge; or about what a human being may or may not know, but only about that what he has before of him in accordance with his organs of perception.

Considering this, one must say to oneself: Behind the colourful carpet of the sensory world, behind that which the warmth sense perceives as warmth or cold and so on, lies an infinite reality. Should therefore only what we perceive, or only the reality we perceive exert an influence on us? If we think that we are only shown a part or a section of the entire reality through our perception, then it is only logically tenable that there lies an infinite reality behind what can be given to us through our perception. However, this is also real for us, as we have been placed in it, so that what surges and lives outside and influences us, lives on for us. But what is our actual waking life like during the day? There really is no other way than to imagine the waking day life in this way, and to say; ‘We open our senses, our capacity to realise something immense and confront this immensity. Because each person has particular eyes, particular ears, and a certain sense of warmth, and so on, we are placing a particular section of reality in front of us. Anything else we reject, almost, as it were, fend it off, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a defence against, or an exclusion of something different. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that we have not perceived. What we perceive is the remainder, are the remains of what is spreading itself around us, and what we, for the most part reject. In this way, we feel actively placed in this world, feel connected with it. Likewise, we defend ourselves through our sensory activity against a multitude of impressions, because, figuratively speaking, we are not able to bear the entire immeasurable infinity and take in only a section of it. If we think like this, then we must imagine quite different relationships between our whole organism, our entire bodily nature and between the external world, than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it will not seem so unusual to think that the relationships, which we have with the outside world, live in us and that also the invisible, super-sensible or extra-sensible is active within us—and that the extra-sensible by being active in us, uses our senses to fabricate a section out of the entire immeasurable reality. Then our relationship to reality is completely different from how we are able to perceive it through our senses. Then there lies something of relationships with the outside world in our soul that does not exhaust itself through sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness. Then it is with us as if we are stepping in front of a mirror with our inner being and have to say to ourselves:

‘Basically you are something completely different. The mirror only shows you the forms, maybe also the colours; but within you you are thinking. You are feeling within you. All of this the mirror cannot show you. It only shows you what is dependent on its laws. As a soul facing its organism, you are something completely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is according to their laws. When you face the world, as with a mirror—you are actually facing a world that is only made possible by the organisation of your senses!’

If you think this idea through to the end, then you will not be surprised to find that basically all life of our awake day consciousness depends very much on the organisation of our sensory organs and on our brain, just as what we see in a mirror depends on the quality of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees a caricature of their face looking towards them, will happily agree that the picture in the mirror is not dependent on them, but on the mirror. In the same way, what we perceive depends on the set-up of our mirroring apparatus, and our soul activity is limited, as it were, reflected back into itself by mirroring itself in our body life. Then it is no longer astonishing that the detail—and this can also be physiologically proven—is dependent on the physical body, whereby this or that happens one way or another in our consciousness. Because everything that the soul does in order for something to become conscious, to become knowledge for us, depends on the organisation of our body. Observation shows us that the concepts that we initially only constructed, actually correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our corporeality is a living mirror. We let the mirror in which we look be as it is. However, there is one way in which we can influence the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, then it can no longer reflect properly. But the reflection in our physicality, which experiences the activity of our soul, is connected with the fact that when we reflect ourselves in our corporeality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our bodily nature, and that which appears as a reflection, we place as an activity before ourselves.

Thus the bodily life actually presents itself as if, in a certain sense, we would write down what we think and then would have the characters in front of us. This is how we write the activity of our soul into our physicality. What an anatomist can verify are only the characters, the external apparatus, because we do not completely observe our soul life if we only observe it within our physical life. We only observe it completely, if we do this independently from our physical life. This, however, can only be done by the spiritual researcher who observes the soul life as it shows itself mirrored into the waking day life at the moment of awakening. It shows that the soul life is like an architect, who builds something during the night, and acts as a dismantler during the day.

Now we have the soul life in the waking state and in the state of sleep before us. In the state of sleep we have to imagine it as independent from body life, like a rider is independent from the horse. But just like the rider uses the horse and uses up its strength, the soul consumes the activity of the body so that chemical processes run like letters of the soul’s life. With this we reach a point where the physical life, as it is limited in the senses, in the brain, is so diminished by us that we have exhausted it for the time being. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process and again build up what has declined. This is the life during sleep—so that we, starting from the soul, perform two opposite activities on our body. So, during the awake state we have around us our world of flowing and ebbing concepts, joy and sorrow, feelings and so on. But while we have them in front of us, we wear out our physical life, we basically destroy it constantly. During sleep, we are the architects, we can restore what we have destroyed during our waking life.

So what does a spiritual researcher perceive? He perceives the architectural activity of rebuilding in curious pictures like a circular movement twisting around itself: a real process, that is the reverse of normal awake day life. It is really no fantasy when one speaks about recognising in these self-entwining movements the mysterious activity that the soul performs during sleep, which consists of reconstituting what we have destroyed during our day life—hence the recuperation through and necessity of the sleep life. So why is the sleep life such that it doesn’t enter into our consciousness? Yes, and why is it that we become conscious of our waking life? The reason for this is that for the processes we perform in our waking day life, we have got something like mirror images. However, when we are performing the other activity of rebuilding what has been worn out, we have nothing wherein this could be reflected. We are lacking a mirror for this. Only a spiritual researcher is able to show the underlying reasons for this. From a certain point onwards, the spiritual researcher experiences not only the soul activity, as I have described it, like a dream memory from sleep, but as if he was not dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he then can perceive an activity which only happens in the spirit. He can then tell himself: ‘Now you are not thinking with your brain, but you are now thinking in a completely different manner; now you are thinking in pictures, independent of your brain.’

The spiritual researcher can only experience something like what has been described earlier, when he experiences that everything that envelops him as something nebulous when he falls asleep does not disappear. Instead, if he is able to limit and withdraw his inner activity, then the mist that is perceptible at his temples, at his joints, at his spine, becomes something that reflects what he is doing—similar to the reflection of what we experience during our physical life.

The whole difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking day life consciousness is that the waking day life requires a different mirror for the soul activity to come to consciousness and uses our bodily nature for this purpose. However, the activity of the clairvoyant, when it radiates as an activity of the soul, is so strong that the emitted ray will be withdrawn into itself. In this way, as it were, a mirroring on one’s own inner experience, on a spirit organism, takes place. Basically, our soul is within this spirit organism during the night, even if we are not spiritual researchers. It pours itself into it. And we will not be able to cope with our whole sleep life, when it is not clear to us that indeed our physical processes—all that anatomy, physiology is able to research—cannot bring about anything but a reflection of our soul processes; and that these soul processes always, from falling asleep until waking up, live a spiritual existence. If we think differently we won’t be able to cope at all. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a secret soul life that cannot enter at all into the consciousness conveyed through our body. Thus, when one notices in a person that ideas appear in his consciousness that he has ignored for a long time, one has to say: There is something else in a human being, apart from the conceptions of his conscious soul life, to which he has paid attention when he took them in.

I have already suggested once, that it is child’s play to refute things that are a reality for a spiritual researcher. And yet they are true. Spiritual research has to say that in regard to the human being we have to deal with a human physical body that we can see with eyes, grasp with hands, and that is also known to anatomy and physiology. In addition, we have an inner member of the human being, the astral body, the carrier of everything that the human being consciously absorbs, what he really experiences during the day life, so that he can receive it reflected by the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the carrier of ideas that remain ignored for years, and are then brought up into the astral body to be realised. In short, between the astral body, the carrier of consciousness, and the physical body, the etheric body of man is active. This etheric body is not only the carrier of conceptions that have gone unnoticed, but in general the builder of the entire physical body.

What actually happens during sleep? The astral body, the carrier of consciousness, lifts itself together with the Ego out of the physical body and the etheric body, so that a split in the human nature occurs. During day life when man is awake, the astral body and the Ego are within the physical body and the etheric body. And the processes of the physical body work like mirroring processes, through which all that happens in the astral body comes to consciousness. Consciousness is a reflection of the experiences through the physical body, and we should not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When, during sleep, the astral body of an ordinary human being leaves, it is at first not able to perceive anything in the world of the astral. The human being is unconscious there.

What ability does the spiritual researcher now acquire when things during sleep become conscious to him, even though he does not rely on his brain? He attains the ability to perceive and to mirror his soul activity in something that for him weaves and lives between things, so that during the awake day consciousness this something can be perceived in the same way as his own etheric body. The human etheric body is woven from that through which the clairvoyant person perceives; so that for a clairvoyant person the outer world becomes reflective, just as for the soul life of a normal person the physical body becomes reflective.

Now there are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is the dream. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that indeed dreaming is based on something similar to clairvoyance, whereby the latter is something trained, while dreaming is always imaginary. When a person leaves with the astral body, he loses the ability to obtain a reflection of his soul life through the physical body. However, under certain abnormal circumstances, which occur for everyone, he can obtain the capability to receive his soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. Indeed we must consider not only the physical body as a mirroring device, but also the etheric body. As long as the outer world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body which acts as mirroring device. However, if we become still within ourselves and digest the impressions the outer world has made on us, then we work within ourselves and yet our thoughts are still real. We live our thoughts, and also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body, namely on the etheric body. Then the etheric body is that what reflects itself in us in solitary pondering, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are within our etheric body during our awake day consciousness; we perceive what is mirrored, but we do not perceive directly the activity of the astral body. In the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we do not have the ability to receive external sensory impressions. But because we can still receive something that is connected to our etheric body in some way, the etheric body can mirror what we experience in our soul with our astral body. This then are the dreams that show irregularity because the human being is in a completely unusual situation during this process.

If we contemplate this, then much in our dream-world will become clear that would otherwise remain mysterious about it. We must therefore imagine the foundations of the soul life as being closely connected with the dream life. While the physical body is the mirror of the soul life and our daily interests have an impact on this, we are often connected in the remotest way through the etheric body to experiences, which we have long since left behind, and of which we become only dimly aware because the day life has a strong impact on us. Thus they remain something extremely unknown to us. However, if we are examine dreams that are based on really good observation, many peculiar things can be shown to us. For example, a good composer experiences an image, where a somewhat diabolical figure plays a sonata to him. He wakes up and is able to write down the sonata. Something became active in him that has worked like something foreign. And this was possible, because there was something in him for which the composer’s soul was ready, but which could not become effective during the awake day life, because physical life was only an obstruction and not suited as a mirror. Here we can see that the bodily life is an inhibitor and in this lies its significance. In our daily life we are only able to experience that for which the bodily life, figuratively speaking, is ‘oiled like a machine.’

The physical life is always a hindrance to us, but we manage to use it to a certain extent. After all, one does need ‘inhibitions’ everywhere. When a locomotive rides over the tracks, it is the hampering, the friction, through which it can drive, because the wheels could not turn without friction. In reality, our bodily processes are what confronts our soul life in a hampering way, and these frictional processes are at the same time mirroring processes. When we are ready in our soul for something but have not yet managed to oil our machine well, then the awake day life is a good ‘brake shoe’. But when we leave our physical body, then our etheric body is able to bring what lives in our soul life to expression—and this will appear to us as something quite foreign as it is of a more subtle nature. Then, once it is strong enough, it forces itself into the dream life, as was the case with the composer. This has less to do with the daily interests than with the hidden interests, that lie more remote in the subtle foundations. For example, in the following—note, that I am just telling you something that has actually been observed—A woman dreams, and although she has children whom she loves very much, and a husband, who loves her extraordinarily, she experiences with great joy that she gets engaged for a second time and all related events she goes through. What does she dream? She dreams experiences that are very far from her current life, that she has once gone through but cannot recognise, because the normal interests of the day are only connected with the physical body. And, what has continued to live on in her etheric body will now, perhaps because a joyful emotion has triggered the dream, be mirrored by the etheric body through another event.

A man dreams that he goes through childhood experiences, and these childhood experiences are wonderfully mirrored. One of these, especially important to him because it went close to his heart, causes him to wake up. At first the dream is very dear to him, but soon he falls asleep again and dreams on. A whole sum of unpleasant experiences now pass through his soul, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is extremely far from his present experiences. He gets up, and because he feels very shaken by the dream, walks around in the room for a while, but then he lies down again and now he has dream experiences, which he has not yet had. All events that he went through get muddled up, and he now experiences something completely new. The whole turns into a poem, which he can even write down and set to music afterwards. That is a very real fact. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult, with the concepts we have already gained, to imagine what has happened there. For a spiritual researcher it is thus; at a very specific moment in his life the man suffered a kind of break in his development—he had to give up something that lay in his soul. But even if he had to give it up, it did not disappear from his etheric body as a result of that. It was just that his ordinary interests were so strong that they pushed it back. And, where it was strong enough through inner elasticity, it forced itself out through the dream, because there the human being is freed from the hindrances of the awake day life. This means, that the respective man was truly once very close to reach what was expressed in the poem; but then it had been deadened.

Thus we can see illustrated in our dreams the independence of our soul life from our outer bodily life. We must realise that this is proof that the idea of the mirroring of the soul life in the physical life is entirely justified. In particular, the circumstance that the interests in which we are involved do not engrave themselves in a straight line in our direct experience, shows us that apart from the life, as it is lived on a daily basis, there is another life running alongside, that I have called, for a more conscious, finer observation, a kind of awakening. In it lives everything that for our spiritual life is already abstract, immaterial like our conscience that is independent of physical life—everyone can feel this. Yet during our day life this other life turns out to be very limited by our daily interests. During sleep, our soul also reveals itself as being completely filled with its moral quality. There is a real living into the spiritual, what we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call Spiritual Science research will result in something for us through which we can consciously settle into the world that the normal human being unconsciously settles into every time he falls asleep.

People must gradually familiarise themselves with the fact that the world is far wider than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect; and that the sleep life is an area that we need because just our noblest organs, which serve our imaginative life, are worn out by our daily life. During sleep we restore them, so that they can face the world strong and vigorously and are able to mirror our soul life for us in the waking day life. Everything that is characteristic of the soul life could become clear to us through this. Who wouldn’t know that one feels wearied and tired after a good, deep sleep? People often complain about this; but it is not a symptom of an illness at all and is actually quite understandable. After all, the complete recovery through sleep only occurs an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked well on our organs, so that they are not only able to cope for a few more hours but for the whole day. And immediately after waking up we are not yet ready to use them, we first have to “grind them in.” Only after a while we can use them well. One should speak about a particular type of weariness in a certain way, saying that one could be happy that one can settle back into the reconditioned organs in an hour and a half. Because from sleep comes to us what we need—the architectural forces for the organs that have been worn out and used up during the day.

So we may now say that our soul life is a life of independence, a life of which we have something like a reflection through our consciousness during our waking day life. Consciousness is a reflection of the interactions of the soul with its environment. During the waking day life we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign, are devoted to something that is not ourselves. But during sleep—and this is the nature of sleep—we withdraw from all outer activity to work on ourselves. The comparison is apt; the ship which has served shipping while it was at sea will be rebuilt and repaired when it arrives in port.

Someone who believes that during sleep nothing happens to us, could also think, that nothing needs to be done to the ship when it returns to port from a voyage. But when the ship sails again, he will see what happens, if it has not been repaired. This is how it would be if our soul did not work on us during sleep. We are brought back to ourselves when we sleep, while during the day life we are lost to the outside world. A normal human being is just not able to perceive what the soul is doing during sleep in the same way as he perceives the outside world during the day.

In the lecture How to attain Knowledge of the Higher World? we will see that also in the spirit a mirror image can be attained as a realisation, through which man can then come to perception in the higher worlds. All this illustrates that the soul, just when it is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of its own activity, but is busy with itself, works on itself, and independently of the physicality, obtains those forces which serve precisely to build up the body.

Thus we may summarise what we have said, and characterise the nature of the soul with words that from the knowledge of the nature of sleep can build a kind of foundation for many things in Spiritual Science:

The soul itself restores
Enveloped still in sleep
Flees into spirit worlds
When senses constrictions
Oppress it! ³

• 1. GA 60 Lecture 7. How Does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?, 15 December 1910, Berlin.
• 2. William Hanna Thomson, Brain and Personality, 1907, published in Germany under the title Das Gehirn und der Mensch, Verlag K R Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, 1910.
• 3. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

Our thoughts, feelings and desires move in two directions and lead us to two ideas of what is constantly around us, the transitory, and what man longs for, the eternal, about which he hopes for enlightenment, which he seeks to unravel because it appears to him as the riddle of life.

The truth that man seeks has been the same at all times; but people are not always the same; and so, at all times, depending on the development of humanity, the answers to the questions about truth have been given differently. The school of thought that wants to give us the answer to the question about the eternal in a way that is appropriate today is called the theosophical one. It has come to fruition in the last four decades.

What people usually understand by knowledge is connected with place and time; and the one who accepts this is the perishable human being. But the deeper core of human nature does not recognize through the senses. It recognizes that which has validity everywhere and at all times. Religions want to give people knowledge of that which is not bound to place and time. And the purpose of religion is to establish the connection between the human and the eternal. Theosophy is the realization of this inner man, of his essential core. Theosophy is not the realization of something other than what is around us, but only of another part of it. Suppose a blind man had been happily operated on in this room. The same objects are still there as before, but now with completely different revelations for him. In a similar way, through Theosophy, man learns about the same things as before – about people, plants, animals and minerals – but he learns different characteristics about them. Just as the operation is there to make the same object visible to the eye of the blind, so Theosophy is there to point out a different aspect of things, to show him new spiritual and psychological characteristics of things. They appear to him in other, more intimate relationships to people and to the whole of the rest of the world. In this way, the human being is uplifted, and the objects take on a new meaning for him. Theosophy is a knowledge of the immortal part in man. What the immortal essence of man is, what the essence of the God-man is, we can gauge from the words of Goethe:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could the sun behold it.
If the power of God did not lie in us,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine.

The eye must meet the sunbeam; likewise, the inner strength of the soul must meet the flowing strength of the Godhead. The mystics have expressed this in their own way; for example, Angelus Silesius, with the words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you will still remain eternally lost.

The realization through the eternal core of our being is a different kind of knowledge than that gained through our senses and mind. We therefore distinguish different kinds of human nature, depending on whether the human being is eternal or perishable. Usually, man is perceived as a very unified being. You can see the human being with your eyes, he is perceptible to your senses like a mineral. But even if the anatomist cuts up the corpse, he only experiences what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. The human being he observes is no different from inanimate nature on the outside. Physical and chemical processes also take place in his body. This human being is the same as the minerals; somewhat more complicated, but the same as the rest of the physical world in itself.

But this is not the whole of man, but only the very first part of man. Thus there is a difference between the other physical bodies and the human body. If we copy a human being and cut off the hand of this imitation, it remains a hand; if we cut it off the real human being, it withers; my hand only has the possibility of existing with me. Without me, it is no longer a hand. A doctor will object: “That's quite natural, because there is no blood circulating in it anymore.” But the question is: Why does my hand need blood and the other doesn't?

And so we come to the second link of the human being; the whole body is a living thing, unlike the crystal. Such beings, from which a piece is taken and yet remains the same, are called “living beings”. We humans also have this life body, which holds the individual parts together; and we call this life body the ether body. For the theosophist, it is just as real as the physical body. And just as we have the physical body in common with all minerals, we have the etheric body in common with all plants. Man is a plant; he grows and reproduces, for these qualities are dependent on the etheric body.

Even more essential than this is the third link. In the same space as the physical body and the etheric body, there is a sum of pleasure and pain - a sum of instincts and drives, thoughts and perceptions that can be cut through just as easily as the physical and etheric bodies. For centuries, this third body has been called the astral body. We have it in common with all animals. Man is thus a being that unites all three kingdoms of nature - minerals, plants, animals - within himself. Goethe recognized this, and Schiller documented it with the most beautiful words in his first letter to Goethe:

For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which every weaker force will guard itself. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory ground for the individual. [Letter of August 23, 1794]

A naturalist from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lorenz Oken, calls the human being an extract harmonized from all the properties of the animal kingdom. Paracelsus, the great physician of the Middle Ages, says: What is spread out in individual letters is united in the human being; one must spell out the whole of nature, then one can put oneself together like a human being.

Thus we have minerals, plants, animals in the physical body, etheric body and astral body in man according to his threefold nature.

Subtle natures recognize a fourth; so Jean Paul, who says of himself: As a young boy, I once stood in front of a barn. Then suddenly a completely new thought came to me: You are a self, and it felt like I had looked into the past of my being.

When we name things, we find that each thing has its own special name, as a table, chair, bench, a name with which everyone can identify the subject. Only humans have a name that they can pronounce only for themselves; can give themselves. The deep spirits of religion always develop this feeling. That is why the Jews called the unpronounceable name of God, Yahweh, I. I cannot grasp my I from the outside, only from the deepest inside. In my inner being, God announces himself in my soul. This I holds everything else together, and the work of the I on the other three bodies is world development. The I dominates all animal nature within itself and ennobles it.

When Darwin once came to an area where man-eaters lived, he told them that it was not good to eat people. He was told in reply how he could know that. Since he had never tasted human flesh, he could not judge whether it was good or bad. By “good” and “bad”, the savage understood only the pleasant and unpleasant. The knowledge that eating people is improper has developed through the work of the I on the astral body. In the beginning, the desires are raw, but the I refines them by plowing through the astral body - the body of desires - in such a way that it is made into the creature of its own I. I then no longer follow my instincts, but what my I - my duties - prescribe to me. We call such an astral body, which is completely transformed, the fifth link Manas. Today's man has partially reached this stage. When he has worked through the entire astral body, he becomes ripe to also work through his etheric body. If he succeeds in doing this, he has reached the sixth stage, Budhi, and can finally work on the physical body from the Budhi plan. When he has mastered the physical body, his whole being - Atma - is awakened in him.

Thus we have the human being in its sevenfold nature: four lower limbs and finally three higher ones, which the human being develops himself. The astral body is also partly the result of the work of the ego.

What happens when a person dies? Here we have the physical body before us. Death and sleep have been compared; but sleep is something else, a state in which a person is temporarily not at all what he actually is. What makes the sleeping person different from the ordinary one? The physical and chemical processes - digestion and the other life processes - take place just as they do when we are awake; pleasure and pain are forgotten. If we prick the sleeping person, they do not feel it until they wake up. In the sleeping person, the physical and etheric bodies - or life body - are in front of you. The astral body, the body of desire, is not present, otherwise the sleeper would also feel pleasure and suffering. The I with the astral body is gone. Sleep is therefore a release of the astral body - the body of desire. Sleep is initially interrupted by dreams. But dreams are not like waking experiences. We distinguish three types of dreams:

First: memories of everyday life, reminiscences. Second: perceptions from the environment, but in a special way. We may see the lamp, but not how it is placed. The ticking of a clock next to our bed may sound like the clatter of horses in the dream - expressed symbolically. Secondly, the dream is a creator of symbols. For example, a farmer's wife dreams that she is walking from the village to town, entering the church to listen to the sermon. The pastor in the pulpit raises his hands. His hands transform into wings. Suddenly, instead of speaking, he begins to crow, just as the rooster outside has crowed. This is the figurative way in which dreams work and create. The astral body is the great symbolizer, it transforms the crowing of the cock into a symbolic image.

Thirdly, the nature of dreams is characterized by remnants of the experiences of the astral body when it is released from the physical body and dwells in another world - the astral world. Dreams can be developed, instead of being chaotic, they can be induced with great regularity.

Death: When a person dies, something else happens; not only does the astral body detach itself, but it also takes the ether body with it. The sleeping person is alive, but the dead person is no longer alive because he has lost the ether body - the life body. After some time, the ether body is given to the rest of the ether world. Then only the astral body with the ego remains. It consists of two parts: what has not been worked through and what the person has already worked into it. Everything that is lent from the outside must be given up after death; and the animalistic is given up in the Kamaloka period - astral world. In this world the task is set to cast off the cover, which one has not cultivated; then one still possesses what one has purely worked out of one's ego.

Kamaloka is followed by Devachan, the place where all that is divine lives, namely the ego and what it has deified of its astral body. There the human being becomes mature to return to this earth again, and what he needs here, he must take on in the new life. He ennobles his astral body more and more in the new life. He can only do this if he gets a new ether body. This re-taking of the lower limbs leads to reincarnation. What a person has worked into his astral body is eternal; what he must discard is transitory, namely, what he has not yet plowed through. When he has worked through his entire astral body, he must also - at a higher level - work through his etheric body. We call such a person a chela.

The Wisdom Teaching differentiates between the mere cultural man and the chela. In ancient Greece, there were schools where not only the great culture was taught, but also chelas - initiates - were formed. One required of such a person that he had undergone a catharsis - purification, cleansing. Only then are the Budhi and the Christ awakened. The difference between the civilized man and the chela is as follows in death: When a chela dies, his etheric body no longer dissolves in the world ether, but as much of it remains as the I has worked into it. The chela will find his etheric body again afterwards to occupy it upon re-embodiment; while the civilized man gets a new one.

What religions prescribe, for example, has an effect on the etheric body: true piety. Letting inner wisdom take effect preserves the etheric body. Books that offer inner wisdom include: [“The Book of Divine Consolation”]; sentences from “The Imitation of Christ”; in the “New Testament”, the Gospel of John contains awakening sentences from the thirteenth chapter onwards that awaken the inner being, eternal power within man. In “Light on the Path” – written by Mabel Collins – every sentence is awakening. The following four sentences are particularly strengthening etheric power:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.
Before the voice can speak before the masters, it must unlearn woundedness.
And before the soul can stand before them, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

Another means is the seeking of worldly truths. Knowledge and wisdom have an effect on the astral body. - Delving into the works of beauty - Raphael's Madonnas. Allowing beauty to flow into oneself has an effect on the astral body. The chela transforms this work into a conscious one. When the chela has worked through his etheric body, he then has to work on getting his physical body under his control.

By working on my astral body, I become a nobler person - wiser and better - and as such I can urge others to ennoble themselves. This is an effect from person to person; the good and wise person will exert a more beneficial influence than the opposite. The etheric body has its ability not only in the physical world, but also in the world of thought. Through imagination, through thoughts, one can influence others. I can send the thoughts of my soul to others. Speaking and admonishing are working in the physical world. Likewise, effects can be practiced in the supersensible world to the extent that the etheric body is worked through and dormant forces are awakened. By pursuing the thoughts into the tool, one makes the forces of the physical body supermundane. This ideal is Atma - or as the Christian says: communion with the Father.

Those who work on themselves in this way reach into the eternal. The stone disintegrates and is absorbed by the earth; the plant also gives its physical body to the earth and its etheric body to the cosmic ether. Like the mineral, man gives his physical body to physical matter, and like the plant, he gives his etheric body to the cosmic ether.

The astral body gradually dissolves in the Kamaloka, but not what has been worked through. Something remains. Man makes himself immortal through what he has worked into his body; he creates a core of his being.

The physical body is broader than the astral body; it does not have such a part that is bad. Take, for example, a thigh bone. It is not a compact mass, but - when viewed under a microscope - a wonderful framework that no engineer could construct. No beam is stronger than it needs to be. No architect could build something like this - it is constructed out in the cosmos. The human heart, with all its fibers, the entire physical body, is such a product of divine order.

The astral body is constantly attacking the physical body. The heart is good. Now the astral body – the body of desire – comes along with wine, tea and other stimulants and disturbs its normal beat. It takes a long time for the astral body to become as wise as the physical body. But then it can work on its etheric body. When the etheric body is also wise, the physical body is worked on; in the future it will strengthen the physical body. But who is working in the physical body today? The Godhead; it is working on the limbs of human nature, on which man does not yet work himself. Let us go back to the example of the cut-off hand. The hand can only exist on the body; removed from it, it withers. Likewise, if I were to be lifted just a few miles above the earth, I would wither away like the severed hand. From this it follows that as a physical human being I am bound to the place where I am placed. Just as I cannot consider the hand by itself, I cannot consider the human being without the earth. Man is not a body in itself, but a part of the whole earth organism. He can only exist with the properties that the earth offers. For example, he could not exist at a temperature of two hundred degrees Celsius. Just as our organism is enlivened by the soul, so is the whole earth organism enlivened by the earth soul.

The 'spirit of the earth' in Goethe's 'Faust' is not a phrase, but truth. Those who awaken the etheric body within themselves can associate with higher spirits, like Goethe, to whom the earth spirit reveals itself:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Waving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

The physical body is a link in the planetary organism. The etheric body is a link in the planetary ether. In the etheric spirit lives the spirit, which is called Budhi or, in Christian terms, 'son'; in the physical body lives the 'father spirit'. Through the astral body, through the etheric body and the physical body we come to God. The 'spirit' is astral, which, when it is well purified, we call the 'Holy Spirit'. In the etheric body we have union with the Son. In the physical body we find the Father-Spirit, the Spirit of planetary life.

All religions are based on such truths. Theosophy wants to awaken these truths. The theosophical worldview wants to give the seeking souls points of reference. Man has arisen from the eternal. If he can do nothing about brain molecules, he can do a lot about his thoughts; and we conquer the lower natures by bringing them closer to the divine.

Man must develop various abilities in the succession of the ages. In ancient India, that to which only the chela can look back is enclosed in the poetry of the “Veda”. In European regions, similar to the Veda, sacred knowledge was laid down by the Druids - holy men, great teachers. The “Edda” is the same as Veda.

In Buddha, the same wisdom teachings appear in a different way. Buddha becomes Wotan in the Germanic: 'Boda' becomes 'Wota', 'Wota' becomes 'Wotan'. Thus we have the same key to German mythology. In the Hebrew secret doctrine we have the 'I' - the 'Jao' - 'Jehovah'. In Christianity, the Christ.

Eternity is taught by the Spirits of Wisdom.

Later there came a time when the physical world was conquered [...]. This conquest of the physical world has caused the spiritual world to recede. This is why Theosophy is now stepping in to replace the rampant materialism with something spiritual. In the past, the various religions taught according to the needs of the individual peoples. Today, materialism has enveloped the entire globe; therefore, the spiritual must also embrace the whole world. Mankind on earth must become a spiritual whole. This is the goal of Theosophy. Just as people understand each other everywhere in the material world, just as a check passes through the whole globe as a common currency, truth and wisdom should become common currencies everywhere. That people everywhere learn to understand each other and exchange their thoughts as a cheque is exchanged for money, that is our goal – and that is why the call for brotherhood among people is the first that the Theosophical Society makes. The last few centuries have conquered temporal goods. Culture has added layers to the earth's crust that bear witness to its evolutionary process. Only in the uppermost layers do we find human remains. Millions of years further on, and everything we are working on now will also form a layer around the globe and provide a uniform cultural history. Theosophy works for the future, in which not only the material, but also the eternal, the immortal, will embrace the whole universe. That is why it places such great value on the core of brotherhood.

In the same way that people understand each other in material terms, they will also understand each other in spiritual terms in the future, when they awaken the eternal, because the eternal is revealed in the soul. Through the eternal that is within us, the eternal is first revealed – and from the transient to the eternal, that is the path prescribed for us by theosophy.

Since all evolution follows three principles—conscious awareness, life and form—and every entity must go through these three principles many times, we need to know exactly what levels of awareness, life or form we may be speaking of. Something can be known about seven of them. The seven levels of conscious awareness are:

1. The ‘trance’ state of the mind, also known as ‘deep trance’
2. Dreamless sleep
3. Dream-filled sleep
4. The waking state, or awareness of objects
5. The psychic state, or life in image awareness
6. The hyperpsychic state, or life in conscious awareness
7. The spiritual state = self-aware all-embracing awareness

The trance state is characteristically universal. It is the most comprehensive awareness as far as the range is concerned, but it is limited by dimness. It is the dimmest state of awareness. An entity living on our Earth which is put into this trance state would perceive the movements of the planets, mineral forms, crystalline forms, etc. Plant, animal and human life would not exist for this spirit. If this trance state is induced, the entity is in a position to see such things in the cosmos, but not the life of physical life forms. If a trance is entered into pathologically, the individuals concerned start to describe cosmic chains, and so on; sometimes this is in a confused way, but sometimes they will produce some very strange things that are very similar to the theosophical teachings. It is a wide-ranging universal awareness, but too dim to perceive actually living, sentient life forms.

The second state is the one we call 'dreamless sleep'. The way in which human beings go through their sleep state is generally still so dim that most of them feel that they are unconscious in it. It is less dim than the first state, but narrower. People who go through it consciously perceive what happens in the mineral and plant worlds, but the animal world, and so on, the world of inner responses and thoughts, does not exist for them. Sleepwalkers of this degree produce extraordinary drawings of arabesques in this state, but are not able to draft cosmic systems.

The third state is that of dream-filled sleep, which is familiar to us. We usually know nothing of any connection between our dreams and what is going on in the cosmos. The state is not all-encompassing but reflects the inorganic world and mineral, plant and animal nature. To someone who has not developed further, reflections of his own passions, his animal nature, will often appear in such dreams.

In the fourth state, the waking state, which is the narrowest but also the clearest, we perceive the mineral world, plants, animals and humans, but only in their outer form; not the law, not the inner response. This is something people must construct for themselves in the waking state, going by the outer gesture.

In the more enhanced states of awareness the bright clarity of physical awareness is retained. The fifth state, psychic awareness, extends through the astral world where feelings are directly perceived. Thus you will not just see someone’s sour face but directly perceive his feelings. The sixth state is the hyperpsychic state of awareness. Here human beings perceive all kama, and in addition also all that lives. They see the principle of growth and of life itself. The seventh state is spiritual awareness. In this, human beings perceive everything that happens in the cosmos in bright, clear conscious awareness.

We then also have the seven stages in the evolution of life. They are:

1. The first elemental world
2. The second elemental world
3. The third elemental world
4. The mineral world
5. The plant world
6. The animal world
7. The human world

To characterize these stages in a way similar to the one used for the conscious mind above, we may say the following. The first elementary world is the most subjective. The second is less subjective. The third even less so. We are in fact able to distinguish three degrees of subjectivity in the three elemental worlds. Where it begins to be objective, that is, acts in such a way that it acts not only from the inside to the outside but is seen from outside, it becomes mineral world. In the case of the first elemental world, existence comes into its own in outer terms. In the case of the second elemental world, life comes into its own in outer terms. In the case of the third elemental world, sentience or awareness comes into its own in outer terms. In the case of the fourth state, which is the mineral world, existence has become objective (4th level of life). The plant world: life has become objective (5th level of life). The animal world: sentience and awareness have become objective (6th level of life). In the human world all three degrees become objective (7th level of life). Conscious awareness and the I have then entered wholly into objectivity.

Life thus evolves through the seven worlds. Form also goes through seven stages, as follows.

1. The arupic form, which is form in its earliest potential, when it is not as yet actual form, but already has the urge to go outwards.
2. The rupic form, which is the spiritual form, with a mere hint of an outer form.
3. The astral form begins to be outwardly visible.
4. The physical form.
5. The plastic form, no longer rigid but making itself felt from the inside, with life pushing outwards, into form.
6. The intellectual form, which has grown even more mobile, with the spirit pushing outwards.
7. The archetypal, original form. This form is absolutely in control of itself, wholly mobile in itself. Everything pushes outwards; it can configure anything; it is active.

If we now want to consider the evolution of a particular entity, we have to be clear in our minds that it has to go through all the stages of conscious awareness, life and form, and that this happens in the following way.

Every entity must go through the seven stages of conscious awareness. Each stage of this state of consciousness in the various forms it takes is called a 'planetary system' in theosophical textbooks. An entity goes through a planetary system, which means that it metamorphoses through these seven states of awareness. The human being is now going through the stage of waking consciousness. This is known as the 'Earth state'. Before this he went through the state of dream consciousness. That was at the stage of lunar evolution. This is put in words as: The human being has completed the Moon stage in his evolution.

Human beings have to go through all realms of life in every state of conscious awareness. On the Moon they thus went through the first, second and third elemental worlds, and through the other four worlds in dream consciousness. On Earth they have to go through the seven stages of life. At present humans are on the planetary system of the Earth, which means in the waking state, in the middle life stage, and in the mineral world. In form, humans are now physical (fourth globe or fourth form state); in terms of life they are mineral (fourth round); in terms of conscious awareness, awake (fourth planetary system). A 'round' means the passage of an entity through one of the realms of life. Each planetary system has seven rounds. On Earth, human beings are in their fourth round. In this round, mineral evolution will be taken to its perfection, in the fifth round plant evolution, in the sixth animal evolution, the animal level of awareness, and in the seventh round human conscious awareness.

Every entity must go through all forms in each of these seven worlds, assuming every form. It will be arupic first, then rupic, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual and finally archetypal. These seven metamorphoses of form were called the seven 'globes' in the early days of developing theosophical teachings:

• arupic metamorphosis the first globe,
• rupic metamorphosis the second globe,
• astral metamorphosis the third globe,
• physical metamorphosis the fourth globe,
• plastic metamorphosis the fifth globe,
• intellectual metamorphosis the sixth globe,
• archetypal metamorphosis the seventh globe.

These seven globes are not actually separate globes; the objective process is not such that one leaves one globe for another. Together they make up an orb in which these different form states are interpenetrating. This evolution of form states was called the 'phase states' in earlier esoteric terminology. Something is connected with this that may be described by taking the following line of thought.

Imagine an entity with physical eyes, and also that all those states are always present in the world. Whilst human beings are at their level, other entities are at different stages of evolution. In esoteric terms this is called: Here a higher form of space begins. This region is called the region of perviousness in esoteric language. Even in the astral world, two entities are able to interpenetrate. You need to develop an inner feeling for this region of perviousness, for the way our world is penetrated by another. Physically we see only part of the cosmos, a part of the whole. From this point of view a visible heavenly body is one that is in the fourth state of form, in the phase of physical form; with regard to life this is the mineral world.

Physical visibility arises gradually, from the arupic form downwards, and then gradually disappears again as we move towards the archetypal form. We therefore also call these form states 'phases'. The Earth went through the arupic, rupic and astral states before it became physically visible. After the physical it will still go through the plastic, intellectual and archetypal states.

On the physical plane, an occult relationship exists between these form phases and the phases of the Moon. The passage through the seven form phases from the arupic to the archetypal state is therefore called a ‘cosmic month’, though the term is not used in all esoteric languages. Passage through all states of conscious awareness is called a ‘cosmic year’. Between cosmic day (form cycle) and cosmic year (conscious awareness cycle) lies the cosmic month (life states). It is longer than a cosmic month and shorter than a cosmic year.

In esoteric terms conscious awareness is ‘the Sun’, form ‘the Moon’, life for us now ‘the Earth’. A state of conscious awareness takes longest, a life state takes less long, and a form state is the least long. Every life state must go through all seven form states. From arupa to archetypal state it goes, first of all in the first elemental world, then in the second and third elemental worlds, and so on. It thus goes through seven times seven consecutive metamorphoses of life—those are the seven rounds, each of which goes through seven metamorphoses. Seven times seven metamorphoses or 49 which every entity has to go through: 49 on Earth, 49 on the Moon, thus 49 each on seven planetary systems, i.e. 7 times 49 = 343 (the sum of digits = 10). These 343 states make up a cosmic year.⁵⁹

We are now in the fourth planetary system (fourth state of conscious awareness, waking consciousness). We are on the Earth, going through the fourth sphere of life, the fourth round, the mineral world. The mineral world has reached the fourth globe, that is, the fourth form phase, which is the physical phase. It will reach perfection in this round, which also means that the human physical body in its mineral aspects will reach perfection in this round. On completion of all 343 states the human being will be what we call a ‘god’. This is not the supreme god but 'the third Logos', which is in truth the Logos of form when it will have gone through the 343 metamorphoses. It is form at its most advanced stage. These different configurations of conscious awareness are form again on the higher plane. Conceived as a whole, these 343 forms are thus the third Logos. The second Logos will represent life at its highest stage, and the first logos, conscious awareness at its highest stage. The stages of form are represented in colours and signs for esoteric students, the stages of life in sounds, life sounding forth. No characterizing signs exist in the physical world for the stages of conscious awareness.

• 59. See lecture given in Domach on 20 November 1914, in Balance in the World and Man, GA 158, tr. D. Osmond; N. Vancouver: Steiner Book Centre 1977.

In all esoteric teaching it is important to learn how we should look at the things around us. Naturally everyone experiences something or other when looking at a flower or anything else in the environment. It is however necessary to gain a higher standpoint, to penetrate more deeply, to connect specific observations with every object. This is the basis, for instance, of the profound medical insight of Paracelsus. He sensed, felt and perceived the force inherent in a particular plant and the relationship of this force to some corresponding function in man. For example he perceived which organ of the human body was affected by Digitalis purpurea (foxglove).

To make this manner of observation clear we will take a particular example. All religions have symbols. We hear much about these today, but such explanations are usually external and arbitrary. Profound religious symbols are however drawn out of the very nature of the things themselves. Let us consider for instance the symbol of the serpent, which was imparted to Moses in the Egyptian Mystery Schools. We will consider what inspired him, what gave him Intuition.

A fundamental difference exists between all those animal creatures having a vertebral column and those, such as beetles, molluscs, worms and so on which have none. The entire animal kingdom falls into the main sections of the vertebrate and the invertebrate animals. In the case of the invertebrates one can put the question: Where are their nerves situated? For the principal nerve-cord passes through the spinal column. The invertebrates however do also have a nervous system, as is the case with human beings and vertebrate animals. With the latter it is distributed outside along the spine until it spreads into the cavity of the body. This is called the sympathetic nervous system together with the solar plexus. It is the same system which the invertebrate animals also possess: only for the vertebrates and man, it has less significance. With the invertebrates this system is much more closely connected with the rest of the world than the nervous system in man's head and spine. The activity of this latter can be obliterated in a condition of trance; then the sympathetic nervous system comes into action. This occurs for instance in the case of somnambulists. The consciousness of the sleepwalker is spread out over the whole life of the environment and goes over into the other beings surrounding us. The somnambulist experiences external things within him. Now the Life-ether is the element which everywhere streams around us. The solar plexus is its mediator. If we were only able to perceive with the solar plexus we should live in intimate communion with the whole world. This is so with the invertebrate animals. For instance, such a creature feels a flower as being within itself. In the earth system the invertebrate animal is somewhat similar to the eye and ear in man. It is part of the organism. There is actually a common spiritual organism which perceives, sees, hears and so on through the invertebrate animals. The Earth-Spirit is such a common spiritual organism. Everything which we have around us is a body for this common spirit. Just as our soul creates eyes and ears in order to perceive the world, so does this common Earth-Soul create the invertebrate animals as eyes and ears in order to see and hear the world.

In the evolution of the Earth there came a time when a process of separation set in. A part separated itself off, as though in a tube. Only when this point of time was reached did it become in any way possible for beings to develop which could become separate entities. The others are members of the one Earth-Soul. Now for the first time a special grade of separation began. For the first time the possibility arose that one day something would be able to say ‘I’ to itself. This fact—that there are two epochs on the Earth, firstly, the epoch in which there were no animals having a nervous system enclosed within a bony tube; secondly, the epoch in which such animals came into being—this fact is distinctly expressed in all religions. The snake is the first to enclose within a tube the selfless undifferentiated gaze of the Earth Spirit, thus forming the basis of ego hood. This fact was impressed on their pupils by the esoteric teachers in such a way that they were able to say to themselves: ‘Look at the snake and you will see the sign of your ego’. This had to be accompanied by the vivid experience that the independent ego and the snake belong together. Thus an awareness of the significance of the things around us was developed, so that the pupils endowed each being in the realm of Nature with the appropriate feeling-content. Moses also was forearmed by such an experience when he went out from the Egyptian Mystery Schools, and so he lifted up the snake as a symbol. In those schools one did not learn in such an abstract way as one does nowadays; one learned to comprehend the world out of one's own inner perception.

We have a description of the human being based on the external investigation of the different parts of his organism, but we can also find man described in old mystical and occult works. These descriptions, however, have arisen in quite another way than by anatomical examination. They are indeed of far greater exactitude and much more correct than what is described today by the anatomist, for he only describes the corpse. The old descriptions were gained in such a way that the pupils, through meditation, through inner illumination, became visible to themselves. By means of the so-called Kundalini Fire¹ man is able to observe himself from within outwards. There are different stages of this observation. The exact, correct observation appears at first in symbols. If man concentrates for instance on his spinal cord, it is a fact that he always sees a snake. He may perhaps also dream of a snake, because this is the creature which was placed out in the world when the spinal cord was formed, and has remained at this stage. The snake is the spinal column outwardly projected into the world. This pictorial way of seeing things is astral vision (Imagination). But it is only through mental vision (Inspiration) that the full significance is revealed.

This path of knowledge leads man to the recognition of the connection between microcosm and macrocosm, so that he is able to divide himself up within the kingdoms of Nature, so that he is able to say to which part of the world each single one of his organs belongs. The old Germanic myth distributes the giant Imir in this way. The dome of the heavens is made from his skull; the mountains from his bones and so on.² That is the mythological presentation of this inner vision. Each part of the world reveals to the esotericist its connection with something in himself. The inner relationship then becomes apparent. All religions point to this kind of intensive development. The Gospels also indicate it. The esotericist says to himself: Everything in the surrounding world—stones, plants and animals are signposts along the path of my own evolution. Without these kingdoms I could not exist. This consciousness fills us not only with the feeling that we have risen above these kingdoms, but also with the knowledge that our existence depends upon them.

There are seven grades of human consciousness: trance consciousness, deep sleep, dream consciousness, waking consciousness, psychic, super-psychic and spiritual consciousness. Actually these are in all twelve stages of consciousness;³ the five others are creative stages. They are those of the Creators, of the creative Gods. These twelve stages are related to the twelve signs of the zodiac. The human being must pass through the experiences of these twelve stages. He ascended through the trance, deep sleep and dream consciousness up to the present clear day consciousness. In the succeeding stages of planetary evolution he will reach still higher stages. All those which he has already passed through he will also retain within him. The physical body has the dull trance consciousness as this was gained by man on Old Saturn. The human etheric body has the consciousness of dreamless sleep, as this developed on Old Sun. The astral body dreams in the same way as one dreams during sleep. Dream consciousness derives from the Old Moon period. On our present Earth, man achieves waking consciousness. The ego has clear day-consciousness.

Higher development consists in this, that one casts out what is in one's own being in the same way as man has cast out the snake, thereby retaining the snake on a higher level in his spinal cord. With still further development human beings will not only cast out stones, plants and animals into the world, but also stages of consciousness. In a stock of bees, for example, there are three kinds of beings which have a soul in common.⁴ Seemingly quite separated beings carry out a common work. In the future this will also be the case with man; he will separate off his organs. He will have to control consciously from outside all the single molecules of his brain. Then he will have become a higher being. This will also be so with his stages of consciousness. One can imagine a lofty being who has put forth from himself all twelve stages of consciousness. He himself is then present as the thirteenth and will say: I could not be what I am, if I had not separated off from myself these twelve stages of consciousness. The twelve apostles represent the stages of consciousness through which the Christ passed. This can be recognised in the thirteenth chapter of St. John in the description of the Washing of the Feet,⁵ which indicates that Christ is indebted to the apostles for his attainment of the higher stages of consciousness: ‘Verily, Verily, I say unto you, the servant is not greater than his lord’. The more highly developed being has left the others behind on the way and has himself now become their servant. Not many people understand the meaning of these words; nevertheless, when they hear this narrative, through feeling they are prepared for understanding. In the first centuries after Christ, for example, through these narratives, our feeling life has been prepared. Otherwise, our causal body would not have been sufficiently prepared to receive the truth. It is through pictorial forms that the soul is prepared. This is why in earlier times the great initiates, with their outlook into the far future, taught people by means of stories. Even today such teachers have a concept of what will be brought about in the future by the teachings of Theosophy. Now man has in himself both good and evil. In the future this will become externally apparent as a kingdom of good and a kingdom of evil⁶ And how at some future time those who are good will have to deal with those who are evil—this is what is being implanted in the soul today through the concepts of Theosophy. At first people were given pictures, now they receive concepts and, in the future, they will have to act in accordance with these in their practical life.

• 1 . See glossary of theosophical terms.
• 2 . In the old Nordic germanic myth dealing with the beginning of the world the different parts of the world were created out of the body of the primaeval giant: from the flesh the earth, from the blood the water, from the bones the rocks, from the hair the forests, from the skull the sky, from the brain the clouds.
• 3 . See: Cosmic Memory, chapter on Saturn, also lecture 27.1.1908, The Influence of Spiritual Beings upon Man. Lec. 2.
• 4 . See: Nine Lectures on Bees.
• 5 . See: The Gospel of John in Relation to the other Three Gospels, Lecture 14. The Gospel of St. John. Notes on 3 lectures, Lecture 2. also: Festivals of the Seasons, second lecture on Easter
• 6 . See: The Apocalypse, lecture 12.

Initially, people became acquainted with their religion through the scriptures, which they understood literally. Today, it is considered enlightened to have outgrown religious documents. Regarding the Old Testament, it has always been said that it is impossible to reconcile the biblical concepts with an enlightened consciousness. People started to understand the scriptures figuratively; they still held on to the symbols. This understanding of biblical symbolism then led people to still take the biblical spirit with a certain seriousness. But even theologians today can hardly decide on anything other than to take the first chapters of the Old Testament only as a figurative representation. A rather cozy view can arise from it, but as man progresses, he cannot remain with this view. It is a kind of path of development: first to move away from the orthodox view, then from the figurative view and to move on to another, again in a sense literal view.

But for this we must learn to understand the language of the old wisdom teachings and recognize that the old teachers did not invent stories, did not create fantasies, but that they had a different conception of the truth than we have today. They wrote down the eternal truth in their teachings. This cannot be brought directly to every person, while the sensual truth can be brought to everyone.

The great teachers of old had themselves undergone an inner development. Their vision was a spiritual one. They knew that what they saw in the spirit could not be seen by everyone around them. The nations were still childlike in their perception. Accordingly, the great truths had to be given to them in a special form suitable for their understanding. Now all great teachers approached people with the awareness that the soul is immortal. It must be developed towards the truth. Moses, for example, knew that when he linked to the ideas of the people, he was planting something lasting in the soul, in the causal body. The materialistic thinker believes that the soul perishes at death. But Moses said to himself: If I communicate the truth to man today in a certain form, it will have an effect in his soul. Later he will be ripe to recognize the truth in its true form. Moses knew that later others would come who would interpret what he taught. He prepared the form. That which he prepared has gone through the incarnations of the souls. He did not consider it right to tell people the final form of the truth right away.

He himself had the truth in the background. He expressed this in the seven days of creation. He brought the truth into the form that corresponded to people's childlike understanding at the time. If he had spoken of the “round” days, he would not have been understood. He therefore spoke of days, as in ancient India one speaks of the days and nights of Brahma.

On the moon, man had a dream-like consciousness. There he had developed dream consciousness to its highest level. Each of us had come there in a kind of germinal state; there he had perceived in a dream-like way, absorbed it and developed it into a germ. These germs slept over from the moon to the earth. A spiritual germ was the human being who came to earth. He had slept through a [pralaya] into the earthly state.

Now his destiny is to come to clear consciousness. He has to go through a long series of states. In the first three rounds, what he had gone through on earlier planets was repeated. Moses speaks of the rounds. During the first round, man is in the first elementary realm. The dream state gently transitions into a state that man has now reached. The moon man did not distinguish between himself and the other objects. For him there was a dream-like pictorial reality in the way the external world is there for us in a dream. He did not perceive through the senses. The contrast between himself and his world was to be developed by man in the first round on earth. Moses calls it the difference between heaven and earth. He was to recognize himself as an earthling next to heaven. That is what happens in the first cycle of development.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Man did not distinguish between himself and the individual objects. It was all still chaos. Then, after the first round, man went through an intermediate state again and then came to the second round. There the objects already got more definite boundaries. He can already distinguish what is around him. It is no longer desolate and confused. He can distinguish between what is spiritual and what is an external object. Before that it was dark on the face of the deep; the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. All that was human was water. The human germs together formed the waters. The Spirit of God brooded over the human germs, which He called forth into forms. There was light.

As soon as we see the outside world, when the entities confront us, only then can they reveal themselves to us. There was light.

God divided the light from the darkness; he made day and night. [Genesis 1:5]

Man perceived the objects. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now followed the Rupic round, the formative round, in which one could perceive existence. There shall be a difference between the waters; each should have its own Kama. Every single human being was set apart by God setting a boundary and dividing the waters above and below the firmament. He implanted in the individual human germ the ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical. The two souls were laid in the human being; the soul that looks up and the soul that looks into the earthly, that lives in the earthly.

In the third round, man enters the third elementary realm. The individual astral bodies of human beings became more and more distinct. Now man becomes independent. He steps out of the mother soil of the earth. He reaches the plant existence. These are not our present plants. Man was in the plant existence himself. All the separated astral bodies gained the ability to bring forth astral beings like the plant. During the third round, man was called to the animal existence, but in a plant-like nature, because the animal had not yet developed the body of passion. He had no warm blood yet. This was formed in the third round of the third elementary realm. The insemination indicates that fertilization has not yet taken place.

God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.

In the beginning, the astral body was not visible. Now it is becoming distinct. The dry land is only the special, more solid form that forms a boundary around itself. The gathering of the waters signifies the general astral world in its entirety.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass and herbs.” [Genesis 1:11]

This was man. The ancient Germans also believed that man emerged from ash and elm, and the ancient Persians also believed that man emerged from a tree.

And have his own seed with himself [...] [Genesis 1:11]

means that each species carried its own seeds within itself and that there was no sexual reproduction.

The fourth round is the one in which the physical human being prepares himself as he is now. Man entered the mineral kingdom, he took on a body that was subject to chemical and physical laws. In the next round, he will no longer have that, but will then control his astral body just as he now controls his physical body. He will then have astral organs, he will be able to develop his organs himself when he needs them, when the astral body will control everything physical. But now, in the fourth round, man can only act with regard to the laws of the mineral world. In the physical, mineral body we are enclosed as in a house. It was only through our becoming physical ourselves that the whole world became physical. Previously, he gained knowledge of the world around him through a kind of clairvoyance. With the fourth round, the whole world of sensual objects has emerged around him. Moses could therefore say:

There are lights in the firmament of the heaven, which divide the day and the night, and give signs, times, days, and years. [Genesis 1:14]

Kant says that space and time come from man himself. Moses said that even then. Everything that can be perceived by the senses only came into being when man became physical, mineral. Through the physical round, we make the mineral body more and more perfect and also develop our astral body. In the next round, it will be developed in the same way as the physical body is today. Man will then float as if in an airy realm. Then man will have become a free being, then he will truly have become an animal being. Only then will animality be expressed in man. The astral body of man is meant here in the image of animals because the astral man moves freely in the astral world, like whales in the water, birds in the air and so on. - That is the fifth round or the fifth day.

In the sixth round, the human Kama-Manas body is formed, the lower mind body, which we now wear hidden in the physical shell. In the sixth round, man will stand as a human being in the true sense of the word, no longer enclosed in a shell. At the same time, the higher animals are formed with man. The Kama-Manas body then reaches the higher level of animal life.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Only then will man become what he is meant to become.

So God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself; male and female he created them.

Through sexuality, the human being develops into a being that will be male and female. The original text reads: He created man male-female. Only now does man truly gain dominion over the animals. He only acquires power, magic, when the actual human being is liberated on the sixth day. - On the seventh day, man had become God-like. In the seventh round, man is in the aupa state again; he has become creative himself, has become God himself, hence it says:

God rested on the seventh day. [Genesis 2:2]

The fourth round is the most important for human life. Man used to be less dense. Moses says:

He took the solid substances of the earth. [corresponds to Genesis 2:7]

He was surrounded by dust. He adopted the mineral laws. He was formed from the dust of the earth, and the living soul was formed in him. When the human being in the Lemurian race acquired solid forms — a skeleton — sexuality also arose. The solidification went hand in hand with the division into the sexes. In the second chapter, Moses describes the human being who later emerged in the Lemurian race, in the two-sexedness. This was taught in all mysteries. It was only in the fourth round that the plant and animal forms emerged as they are today. During the development of man, the plants and animals split off from him. The lower animals had arisen before. Warm-blooded animals only arose with humans. The animals developed as a result of retarded humans splitting off. The animals are the decadent human nature. They no longer fit into today's conditions. They are creatures that have remained at earlier stages. The original animal forms split off first, only then did the two sexes of humans arise.

In the beginning, man used his entire productive power externally. In the beginning, man reproduced from within himself. When he had lost the ability to penetrate dense matter, he used half of his productive power as a thinking organ.

On the one hand, man became a sexual being, while on the other, he developed half of his productive power internally into a thinking organ. He now acquired the ability to process the spirit with his brain. The spirit now fertilized him. At the same time as the division into two sexes, the thinking human being emerged. He recognized good and evil. During this period, the spinal cord and the brain also developed.

This is the snake that originated in man himself. He went through the amphibian stage. This being was his own seducer. It began to develop with the beginning of its passage through sexuality. Spinal cord and brain first developed in amphibians, and in man in the amphibious state.

The last lecture dealt with the subject of how the Christ Impulse will unfold in future times, and also, of course, in our own epoch. We heard that sheaths will weave themselves as it were around the Christ Impulse: Wonder into an Astral Body; feelings of love or Compassion into an Ether-Body; the power of Conscience into what corresponds to a Physical Body. Thereby that Ideal Being Whose “ I ”—the Christ Impulse Itself—passed into the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, will reach completion in the course of the time still remaining to Earth-evolution. The fundamental character of the future Ideal of humanity was described in one of its aspects and the present lecture will endeavour to add yet another, different picture.

The Christ Impulse came, so to say, in the middle of the epoch following upon the great Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch may be said to extend from the time of the Atlantean catastrophe to the next great catastrophe of which you may read in the lectures on the Apocalypse. (Nuremburg, 1908.) In the middle of this period, the most important of all events in Earth-evolution takes place—the coming of the Christ Impulse. As the last lecture indicated, it is not necessary to turn our eyes to Palestine in order to realise that something of the highest importance was taking place at that time in Earth-evolution. We have only to study the Graeco-Latin epoch of culture, lying as it does in the middle of the Post-Atlantean period, and recall one of its characteristic features; this again can be compared with a similar feature in the preceding Third epoch and in our own epoch.

The essential and fundamental character of a Greek Temple has often been described. Its form stands there as a complete, self-contained, independant whole, even when it is not actually before our eyes, even when we conceive of no human being anywhere near it. Inside a Greek Temple, human beings always seem to be a disturbing element; they do not really belong to it, they do not belong inside it. For what, in reality, is a Greek Temple? We can only understand it in its whole form and structure, if we think of it as the dwelling-place of a living, invisible God who has come down to the physical plane. That is the reason why every Temple is dedicated to one particular God. And when we picture the God in the Temple—with no human beings present—the God for whom a dwelling-place has been built on Earth ... then we have grasped the “idea” embodied in the Greek Temple. Human beings really have no place there. This was the idea underlying the whole architecture of a Greek Temple. Such architecture could only arise in an epoch when the Divine Spiritual was known to pervade all existence on the physical plane. Men whose paths appeared to be everywhere steeped in the Divine could feel all the depth of meaning contained in words uttered by one of themselves: “Better it is to be a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of the Shades!” ... that is to say, in the world lying on the other side of the Gate of Death. It was the period when human beings experienced, in greatest intensity, their union with the physical plane and with the Spiritual pervading the physical plane.

Let us compare a Greek Temple with a building of the same character in the preceding epoch—and with buildings which, in our own epoch, indicate its fundamental attitude and trend. Think of an Egyptian Temple, even of the Pyramids: they become intelligible only when we see them as expressions of man's aspiration to the Divine—to the Divine Godhead who has not yet descended to the physical plane. In the architecture of the Egyptian time, every line, every form, expresses the striving of man towards the Divine-Spiritual. But these mysterious and deeply symbolical buildings indicate in themselves that men must have undergone preparation before the architectural forms could help them to find the way to the Divine-Spiritual. They needed preparation: they must have reached the first stage of Initiation. The same applies to the architecture of Asia Minor. In our own epoch, Gothic architecture gives the keynote. This is an occult fact. It is impossible to have the same conception of a Gothic Cathedral as of a Greek Temple; for a Gothic Cathedral is incomplete without the congregation of believers. It is simply not complete without the human beings within it! All its forms seem to convey that they are there to receive the prayers of the believers—the “believers,” in contrast to the “Initiates” in ancient Egypt. Anyone who can discern what these things mean, realises from the course taken by the evolution of Form from the Egyptian Temple, through the Greek Temple, to the Gothic Cathedral, that the impulse leading to the unfolding of the human “ I ” entered at a certain point into the process of earthly existence. Wherever we look we can perceive how the Christ Impulse lays hold of man, leaves its stamp and signature upon all happenings, all development, and it seems grotesque when philosophical or theological thought declares that acceptance of such an Impulse rests upon the basis of historical records. It does not rest upon any historical record whatever, but simply and solely upon a discerning, clear-sighted observation of human evolution; for no matter where we look, we see that development follows the same course as that revealed in Architecture. The Initiate who alone was capable of understanding the architectural forms of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—the Third Post-Atlantean epoch—knew that he must raise himself above the level of ordinary manhood: then and only then could he ascend into the region of Divine Spiritual life. The Initiate of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch knew that in the physical world he was living together with the Divine, but he had very little connection with what the Greeks called the World of Shades, because by that time man had descended more deeply into physical existence. And when the Gods did not mingle with men in the Temples, the Greeks felt no connection with that other world.

Since the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch these conditions have changed—changed in the sense that it is possible now for every single soul to find the path to the Divine-Spiritual. It is extremely important to realise this for it is the most concrete expression of the fact that in ancient times men were much nearer to the Spiritual in their consciousness, in their knowledge and in their life of soul. Then came the descent to the physical plane and now there must be a gradual re-ascent. We are living in the age when the re-ascent must be undertaken consciously—whereas, to begin with, the Christ Impulse worked unconsciously in men.

Our own epoch is a kind of recapitulation of the Egypto-Chaldean period. Of the Graeco-Latin epoch there is no recapitulation, for it lies in the middle of the seven consecutive periods. The Third epoch is being recapitulated, in a certain form, in our own age; the Second epoch, that of ancient Persian culture, will be recapitulated in the Sixth epoch by which our own will be followed; and in the far distant Seventh epoch, before a stupendous catastrophe, the First epoch, that of ancient Indian culture, will be recapitulated—not, of course, in the same form, for the recapitulation will everywhere bear the imprint of the Christ Impulse.

A certain consciousness existed, especially in olden times, of what has come to pass in the evolution of mankind. Olden times, of course, were paramountly conscious of the descent of humanity, the descent to the physical plane from the heights of Divine-Spiritual existence. But for every process there must be preparation. There had been preparation, too, for the Impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha in the Fourth epoch—the Impulse for the re-ascent. This Impulse had its “forerunners”—in Elijah, John the Baptist and others. But consciousness of the fact that mankind has descended from Divine-Spiritual existence and in the future must re-ascend into the worlds of Divine Spirit, was present not only in the culture which eventually made its way into the West; evidences of such consciousness are to be found in every civilisation.

A very widespread and characteristic idea finds expression in the traditions of practically all the peoples—an idea which may, it is true, have very ramified applications, but can finally be associated with a definite and specific tradition. It is a tradition upon which there has been much reflection and upon which occult knowledge alone can shed light, namely, the tradition of the “Flood.” Much that is connected with this tradition refers, of course, to far earlier times, but the following is brought clearly to light by occult investigation. Nearly all the peoples who have left reliable historical records or legends refer to the Flood as having taken place about three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha; that is the period indicated by the legends. There is not enough time today to explain why this last Flood which was supposed to have occurred three thousand years before our era, cannot be taken to indicate a great physical catastrophe or deluge. Obviously it does not refer to the Atlantean catastrophe, for that took place very much earlier. The “Flood,” therefore, must mean something entirely different. Yet the fact should not be lost sight of that the traditions of all the peoples in question place the Flood in the fourth millennium before our era. Although the dates vary a little, they tally in the main essentials.

At this point I will ask you to remember that in the First Post-Atlantean epoch, when the Holy Rishis were the great teachers of men, culture was inspired, paramountly, by the human ether-body; during the ancient Persian epoch, culture was inspired by the astral body, the sentient body; in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch by the sentient soul; in the Graeco-Latin epoch by the mind or intellectual soul; in our present epoch by the consciousness soul (or “spiritual soul”). And now the time is approaching when the powers of the Spirit-Self will gradually be imbued into culture. In that development proceeded in this way, the experiences arising in man's life of soul underwent deep and far-reaching change. Just think of it. The picture of the world presented to a man of the earliest Indian epoch, of which even the Vedas have no knowledge, received its essential character and stamp from the working of the ether-body. Through the ether-body man cannot direct his gaze to the outer world in the way that is customary in our time. His perception, his picture of the world cannot be as they are today; where the forces of the ether-body are in operation, everything arises from within. A man of today can only have an idea—dim and lifeless at that—of perception which derives from the ether-body, when he recalls the character of his dreams. But the dreams and visions through which, during the ancient Indian epoch, one human being became known to another, were living and real in the very highest degree. To imagine that when one human being met another, the outer perception of him was the same as it is today, would be quite erroneous. The man of ancient India saw pictures—but in those times the other human being physically before him was enveloped in an auric cloud, shrouded in a kind of mist. The character of perception was altogether different compared with perception as it is at the present day, these pictures, although full of the greatest spiritual import, were blurred and hazy. The forces streaming down from Cosmic Space, from the world of the stars—it was these forces that were seen in such clarity and brilliance in those ancient times. In the Second Post-Atlantean epoch the power to look outwards gradually unfolded but, strangely enough, the faculty for gazing into the great Cosmic Spaces remained. Whereas perceptions of the world below were still hazy and without definition, the ancient Persian gazed with lucid clarity into the world of the stars. It is therefore intelligible that Zarathustrianism should point directly to Cosmic Space, to the light of the Sun, to “Ahura Mazdao” or Ormuzd. This was because the astral body was paramountly active. By the end of the ancient Persian epoch, the faculty of looking outwards into the physical world was already in its preparatory stage. The impulses leading to perception as it is in our day have been developing for long, long ages. Thus the impulse to look out into the physical world was gradually instilled into man, leading him to the entirely new mode of perception which began to light up by slow degrees.

When the ancient Persian epoch was drawing to its close and the next period was glimmering like a dawn of the future, men felt: “We shall no longer be able to experience with such intensity the Divine heritage that has come to us from the olden days of Atlantis, when with their power of inner, clairvoyant vision, men lived in communion with the worlds of Divine Spirit ” ... The gaze was turned back to the past. What mattered most for these men were their remembrances in which living pictures arose like dreams—dreams of how the Gods had fashioned the world through the ages of Lemuria and Atlantis. They felt that these remembrances were withdrawing, were fading away from humanity and that conditions were approaching when man must work with a faculty which tells him of the outer world, clouds the bright light of the inner world of the Spirit, and compels him to look from within-outwards, if he is to master the external world. This age was drawing nearer and nearer. Those who had the deepest, clearest perception of the dawn of the new epoch were men who at that time were the knowers and sages in ancient India. They felt it in the form, as it were, of a Divine Impulse, compelling the human being to think for himself, through inner activity, about what confronts him in the physical world to which he was descending. Picturing this Impulse as a Divine Being, the successors of the first, very ancient Indian culture—those who were living now during the Second Post-Atlantean epoch—called this Being “Pramathesis.” These men felt: “The God Pramathesis is drawing near, snatching human beings away from the guidance given by the ancient Gods; God Pramathesis is causing the disappearance of all that ancient clairvoyance revealed concerning the world and is forcing man to look outwards into the physical plane. Darkness is creeping over the world of the ancient Gods. A time is approaching when in their life of soul men will no longer be able to gaze into the world of the Gods, but when their eyes will be turned to the outer world. Kaliyuga, the ‘Black Age’ is approaching; the bright age of ancient Divinity is giving place to the age when the Gods of old withdraw. It is the age inaugurated by the God Pramathesis!”

Kaliyuga was said to begin at a time which lies 3,101 years before our own era; this is the time of the “Flood” according to Indian tradition. For it was said that the Flood coincides with the coming of Kaliyuga, and Kaliyuga was conceived to be the offspring of the God “Pramathesis”.

Kaliyuga broke in upon the world, reaching its close in our own age. Now that the ascent to the spiritual world must begin, a spiritual science has come to mankind. Kaliyuga began 3,101 years before our era, and ended in the year 1899 A.D. That is why 1899 is a year of such importance. The re-ascent to the spiritual worlds—this must be the ideal of the future.

The age preceding the onset of Kaliyuga was, however, an age characteristic of the ancient Persian epoch when the old remembrances rose up within man via the astral body. Now he was to turn to the world outside. This was a great and epoch-making transition. In the case of many human beings it came about in such a way that for a time all vision departed from them and darkness spread over their souls. This condition of darkness did not last for long periods, actually only for weeks. But men passed into this condition of sleep, and many never came out of it. Many of them perished and only relatively few were left in widely scattered regions. There is not enough time today to describe the conditions actually prevailing at that time. It can only be said briefly that owing to so large a number of human beings having succumbed, conditions were dark and sinister in the extreme and at only a few scattered places did men awaken from the great spiritual deluge that spread over their souls like a sleep. This condition of sleep was felt by most souls as a kind of “drowning” and by only a few as a re-awakening. And then came the “Black Age,” the age devoid of the Gods.

Were these things known to other human beings on the Earth? They were indeed. To our astonishment we find widespread evidence of knowledge among the peoples that a deluge had submerged the consciousness of men and that in the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, through the development of the sentient soul—in other words, outward-turned vision—an entirely new power must have been inaugurated. The Indians divined this when they said: Kaliyuga is the offspring of Pramathesis. And what did the Greeks say? In Greece, “Pramathesis” becomes, “Prometheus”—which is exactly the same. Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus. The latter represents one who still “looks back” into ancient times. Epimetheus is the one whose thoughts turn backward; Prometheus sends his thoughts forward, to the world outside, to what takes place there. Just as Pramathesis has his offspring in Kaliyuga, so, too, Prometheus has his offspring. The Greek form of “Kaliyuga” is “Kalion.” And because the Greeks felt it to be the age of Darkness, the “ d ” is prefixed and the word becomes “Deukalion”—which is really the same word as “Kaliyuga.” This is not ingenious fancy, but an occult fact. It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks possessed the same knowledge as the Indian sages. This is quoted merely as an example, indicating that in their conditions of old clairvoyance, knowledge of these truths came to men and they were able to express them in majestic pictures. The Greek legend tells how, on the advice of his father Prometheus, Deukalion builds a wooden chest; in this he and his wife Pyrrha alone are saved from destruction, when Zeus proposes to exterminate the human race by a deluge. Deukalion and Pyrrha land on Parnassus, and from them issues the new human race. Deukalion is the son of Prometheus—and in the intervening period comes the flood, denoting among manifold peoples, a condition of consciousness.

These wonderful pictures which have been preserved in the traditions of so many of the peoples, show us how truths concerning the evolution of mankind have survived among them.

As men lived on gradually into the age of Kaliyuga, into the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient clairvoyant knowledge faded away. We who have to recapitulate the Third epoch, must bring this kind of knowledge to life once again, but in an entirely new form. The lecture given a fortnight ago (The Idea of Reincarnation and its Introduction into Western Culture) dealt with this subject. Western culture, the beginnings of which were mingled with the ancient Hebrew culture, has to concentrate primary attention on the single personality living on the physical plane between birth and death; Western culture cannot focus its main attention on the Individuality who passes through the different epochs, but concentrates upon the existence of the one personality, whose life between birth and death runs its course on the physical plane, not in the higher worlds. Now that Kaliyuga has come to an end, consciousness must be imbued with the forces necessary for the further evolution of the human race; what was lost during Kaliyuga must be raised again from the depths. Our eyes must be directed more and more to the onflowing life of the Individuality. I have spoken of a series of lives in the West—Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis—and have shown how by the addition of knowledge derived from the spiritual worlds, we can perceive the continuous thread of the soul, the onflowing life of the one Individuality in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis.

In our Movement, development of this insight must be a conscious aspiration, for it is a necessity in the evolution and culture of the Earth. No progress would be possible by the mere continuation of the old experiences, the old knowledge. I have emphasised often enough all that it means for the minds of men to enrich and make fruitful the heritage of ancient times by means of the new knowledge now available. It must, however, be realised that just as the transition from life inspired by the astral body to a spiritual life of soul, primarily in the sentient soul, was fraught with deep significance, so, now, we must work our way from life in the consciousness soul to life in the Spirit-Self. I have intimated how this will take place by saying that during the next three thousand years, an increasing number of human beings will experience the Appearance of the Christ Impulse, will be able to experience the Christ Impulse in the spiritual worlds. But actual realisation of the influences streaming in from the spiritual world will have to unfold in greater intensity in the times lying ahead of us. It will not suffice to know, in theory, that “generally speaking” the human being lives on after death; man's whole picture of life must carry the sure conviction that when the human being passes through the Gate of Death, he lives on still, death being merely a transition. We must realise, not as a theory, but as actual knowledge, that while a human being is alive, he works upon us physically, through his body; after his death he works spiritually, out of the spiritual world, upon our physical world. He is present in very truth. We must learn to see life in the light of such a fact and to reckon with what it involves.

Suppose it is our task to educate children.—Anyone acquainted with these things is well aware that to educate children who up to their twentieth year still have parents living, is a very different matter from having to educate children whose fathers died when they were four or five years old. When education is taken in deep earnestness, and the individuality of the child really studied (it is not a matter of speculation!)—especially in the case of a child whose father is dead, we shall often discern that there is something unusual at work here, something we cannot, at first, quite get hold of. Moreover we shall not succeed in getting to the root of it, if we adopt the modes of thought drawn from materialism. But here and there the thought may occur: “Here is a strange current of the times. Most people regard those who belong to it as fools; but it may be worth while to find out what these Theosophists have to say about the destiny of human beings after death. The Theosophists tell us that although human beings discard their physical bodies at death, the content of their life of soul, their hopes, aspirations and so forth, live on, and are not inactive. Indeed they are often more active after death than when the human being was living on the physical plane, enclosed in his body” ... Those who speak like this, have paid attention to the results of spiritual research and will realise that the father is working upon the child from the spiritual world; moreover that he has definite hopes and longings which make their way into the life of the child! With this knowledge, success may come where it was not possible before, and we know how to deal with sympathies and antipathies which may express themselves in the child. To succeed with children we need to know more than that the air affects them, and that when the air is chilly they may catch cold. We must have knowledge of the influences playing from the spiritual world into the physical, and of the form they take.

These things are still regarded as nonsense, but the time is not far distant when the very facts of life will compel people to take account of them and to reckon with what endures in the form of live and potent impulses after human beings have passed through death. Not until then will the concrete reality contained in the spiritual conception of the world be grasped.

Naturally, these influences from the spiritual world are not at work in the case of children only; influences also come from individualities in the spiritual world who were connected with human beings at a later age of life. To begin with, a man may be quite unaware of these influences. (Again I am not inventing but telling you of actual observations, confirmed by spiritual investigation.) After a time a man may say to himself: “I do not know why I am impelled to this or that action, why I have this impulse; something is urging me to think quite differently now, about certain things.” Subsequently he may have a very striking dream. Little heed is paid to things of the kind nowadays, but men will gradually become aware that it is not the “form” but the content of the dream that is of importance. From this you may conclude that if Edison had made his discoveries in a dream, they would have been just as effective! Suppose a man dreams that some unknown person comes to him, someone he cannot even think of as an acquaintance, indeed cannot place at all. This person comes into his life of dream and various things happen ... Finally he realises that this person whom he cannot recall, who died perhaps fifteen years before, is working into and influencing his life. Whereas previously he felt that certain impulses were urging him on, he is now fully aware that these impulses, in the form of a dream-picture, are working into his night-consciousness. This is often characteristic of the connection between impulses within us and influences working upon us in the shape of dreams. Such experiences will become increasingly familiar.

And now, in conclusion, let us see how they will become familiar.

Suppose someone today reads one of the many biographies of Raphael. He will get the impression that in a certain respect Raphael stands there as a phenomenon, complete in himself, giving forth the highest and best that was in him, but so enclosed within his particular sphere of work that it is difficult to imagine him rising still higher or transcending the level he had actually reached. And again: Raphael's creative genius seems to have been alive in him from the the very beginning ... On the subject of its phenomenal manifestation in Raphael's early boyhood the biographies have nothing to say. And why?

The biographies give the information that Raphael's father was Giovanni Santi who, among other activities, was also a writer; he died when Raphael was eleven years old, but before his death he had placed the boy under the tuition of a painter. It is also known that Giovanni Santi was himself a talented painter but that there was something in him which he could not bring to expression. We feel that there was something in the soul of Giovanni Santi which did not make itself manifest because his outer nature frustrated it. He died when the boy Raphael was eleven years old. From the very way in which Raphael develops we can discern the source of the powers which enabled him to reach maturity and perfection so rapidly they are the influences playing into him from his father, forces coming from the spiritual worlds. Anyone who tries to write a true biography of Raphael in the future will have to emphasise the point that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, died in 1494, when the boy was only eleven years old. Giovanni Santi was a distinguished man, who during his life on Earth aspired to great things. And his aspirations continued when, living on without frustration in the spiritual world, he was sending down to his beloved son—in the form of delicate and intimate spiritual influences—forces which his own constitution had prevented him from bringing to expression in the physical world.

To say this is no disparagement of Raphael's genius, for the ground must naturally have been there. We know that he was the reincarnation of John the Baptist and had only to receive into himself those forces which it was his particular mission to bring into manifestation at that time. Thinking of this, we can perceive the interplay between the spiritual world and the physical plane. Future study of the life of Raphael will have, at every turn, to concern itself with the influences which poured from the Spiritual into the Physical. Then we shall have a picture of “wholeness”—of forces working around us, through us, in us. Thus will spirituality again be instilled into culture. But it must not surprise us if those who are unwilling today to listen to any suggestion of the introduction of spirituality into culture, are contemptuous of this spiritual conception of the world; for it is something completely new. It is a dawning of the new power of the Spirit-Self. And a time will come—I ask you to write this deeply into your souls—when men will think of the materialistic culture which is now on the way to its close, as they once thought about the age preceding the Flood, yearning and longing for the future culture which, when it came, was something wholly and essentially new. Theosophists, however, should not merely strive for this ideal in theory, but receive it into their very souls; they should regard it as their good Karma to know about the course of human evolution and therewith of human culture.

These things will have to be pondered over for a time, because I am not yet in a position to say exactly when the next lecture can take place.¹ But we know well that time is required to make Spiritual Science an integral force and impulse in our hearts and minds; and we know, too, that it is part of spiritual development not only to understand the truths but actually to unfold all that the great ideas born from a spiritual conception of the world can say to our hearts.

• 1. Between the date of this lecture and the next of the series (18th June, 1912), Dr. Steiner had given two lectures in Copenhagen: On the Meaning of Life, 23rd and 24th May, 1912; three lectures in Norrköping: Anthroposophical Ethics, 28th and 29th May, 1912; and two lectures in Christiania: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, 2nd June to 12th June, 1912.

We have heard how in accordance with anthroposophical knowledge, the being of man must be viewed in relation to the whole universe. We considered the human form and figure and its relation to the fixed stars, or rather to the representative of the fixed stars—the Zodiac. We heard how certain forces proceed from the constellations of these stars when combined with the Sun forces, and how the shape and structure of the human head and the organs connected with it, are related to the upper constellations of the Zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. The structure of the human chest-organisation is connected with the middle constellations; Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. Finally the metabolic-and-limb system is connected with the lower constellations: Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces—that is to say with their forces when they are, in a sense, covered by the Earth. So that we can say: The fixed stars—for the Zodiac is only the representative of the fixed stars—work upon the human form and structure.

The planetary spheres work upon man's stages or forms of life. It must indeed be quite clear to us that man has various kinds of life in him. We should not be able to think, the head would not be an organ of thought, if life were as rampant there as it is in the metabolic system, for example. When metabolism becomes too strong in the head, consciousness is extinguished; we lose our consciousness of self.

From this it may be concluded that for consciousness, for mental presentation, a damped-down, suppressed life, a declining life is necessary; while a thriving life, vehement and intense, is necessary for what works more from out of the unconscious, to become will.

We have therefore among the various stages of life some which tend towards self-extinction, and some in which strong, intense organic activity manifests, as in a child, in whom thought is not yet operating. We have this child-like life continually within us; but into this child-like life, the life that is involved in a gradual process of death, inserts itself.

These different stages of life are connected with the planetary spheres. Whereas the fixed stars work in man through his physical forces, the planetary spheres work through his etheric forces. The planetary spheres, therefore, work upon man in a more delicate way. But the human physical body has already received its form, its shape from the fixed stars, not from anything earthly; and its stages of life from the planetary spheres.

We have thus considered the form of man's physical body, the life-stages of his ether-body. We can now proceed to consider his life of soul-and-spirit. But here our mode of study must be different. What is it that our physical and our ether-body provide for us in waking life? They provide what we perceive through our senses and what we can work over in our thoughts. We are only really awake in our acts of sense-perception and when we work over them in thought.

On the other hand, consider the life of feeling. It is obvious, even to superficial study, that feeling does not indicate a state of awakeness as complete as that of thinking and sense-perception. When we wake in the morning and become aware of the colours and sounds of the outside world, when we are conscious of the conditions of warmth around us, we are fully awake and then, in our thoughts, we work over what is transmitted by the senses. But when feelings rise up from the soul, it cannot be said that we are conscious in them to the same extent. Feelings link themselves with sense-perceptions. One sense-impression pleases us, another displeases us. Feelings also intermingle with our thoughts. But if we compare the pictures we experience in dreams with what we experience in our feelings, then the connection between dream-life and the life of feeling is clearly noticeable.

Dreams have to be grasped by the waking life of thought if they are to be valued and understood aright. But feelings too must be observed, as it were, by our thought-life if we are to understand them. In our feelings we are, in reality, dreaming. When we dream, we dream in pictures. When we are awake, we dream in our feelings. And in our will we are asleep, even when fully awake. When we raise an arm, when we do this or that, we can perceive what movements the arm or hand is making, but we do not know how the power of the will operates in the organism. We know as little about that as about the conditions prevailing from the time we fall asleep until we wake up. In our willing, in our actions, we are asleep, while in our sense-perceptions and our thoughts, we are awake. So we are not only asleep during the night; we are asleep, in part of our being, during waking life too. In our will we are asleep and in our feelings we dream. What we experience during actual sleep is withdrawn from our consciousness. But in essence, the same is true of feeling and willing. It is therefore obviously important to realise what it is that the human being experiences in these realms of which ordinary life is quite unaware.

You know from many anthroposophical lectures that from the time of going to sleep until that of waking, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body and the ether-body. Now it may be of very great importance to learn about just those experiences which the Ego and the astral body pass through from the time of falling asleep to that of waking up. When we are awake, we are confronted by sense-perceptions of the material world. To a certain extent we reach out and encounter them; but with our sense-perceptions, our waking thoughts, we reach no further than the surface of things.

Of course someone may object, saying that he can get further than the surface of things, that if he cuts a piece of wood which is there before him as a sense-perception, then he has penetrated inside it. That is a fallacy, however, for if you cut a piece of wood, you have again only a surface, and if you cut the two pieces again, still you have only surfaces; and if you were to get right to the molecules and atoms, again you would have only surfaces. You do not reach what may be called the inner essence of things, for that lies beyond the realm of sense-perception. Sense-perceptions can be conceived as a tapestry spread out around us. What lies this side of the tapestry we perceive with our senses; what lies on the other side of the tapestry we do not perceive with the senses. We are in this world of sense from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. Our soul is filled with the impressions made upon us by this world of sense. Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

But when we fall asleep, we emerge from the world of sense and penetrate to the other side. And whereas we experience Nature here with our waking thoughts, in yonder world, from the time of falling asleep until the time of waking, we live in the world of Spirit, that world of Spirit through which we also pass before birth and after death. In his earthly development, however, man is so constituted that his consciousness is extinguished when he passes beyond the world of sense; his consciousness is not forceful enough to penetrate to the spiritual world. But what Spiritual Science calls Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—these three forms of super-sensible cognition—give us knowledge of what lies on the other side of the tapestry of sense. And what we discover first, is the lowest stage of the world of the Hierarchies.

When we wake from sleep we pass over into the world of animals, plants, minerals—the three kingdoms of Nature belonging to the world of sense. When we fall asleep, we pass beyond the world of sense, we are transported into the realm of the first rank of Beings above man—the Angels. And from the time of falling asleep until waking, we are connected with the Being who is allotted to man as his own Angel, just as through our eyes and ears we are connected with the three kingdoms of Nature here in the world of sense. Even if at first we have no consciousness of this connection with the world of the Angels, it is nevertheless there. This connection extends into our astral body.

If, living in our astral body during sleep, we were suddenly to wake up, we should contact the world of the Angels, in the first place the Angel who is connected with our own life, just as here in the earthly world we are in contact with animals, plants, and minerals.

Now even in the earthly world, in the world of sense, if a man is attentive and deliberately trains his thinking, he sees much more than when he is unobservant and hasty. His connection with the three kingdoms of Nature can be intimate or superficial. And it is the same with regard to the world of spiritual Beings. But in the world of spiritual Beings, different conditions prevail.

A man whose thoughts are entirely engrossed in the material world, who never desires to rise above it, or to acquaint himself with moral ideas extending beyond the merely utilitarian, who has no desire to experience true human love, who in his waking life has no devotion to the Divine-Spiritual world—on falling asleep, such a man has no forces which enable him to come into contact with his Angel. Whenever we fall asleep, this Angel is waiting as it were for the idealistic feelings and thoughts which come with us, and the more we bring, the more intimate becomes our relation to the Angel while we are asleep. And so throughout our life, by means of what we cultivate over and above material interests, we garner, in our waking life, forces whereby our relation to the Angel becomes more and more intimate.

When we die, all sense-perceptions fall away. The outer world can no longer make any impression upon us, for this must be done via the senses, and the senses pass away with the body. In like manner, the thinking that is connected with sense-perception is extinguished, for its realm is the ether-body. This ether-body only remains with us for a few days after death. We see it at first as a tableau—a tableau which under certain circumstances can be glimpsed during life but which will inevitably arise before us after death.

This ether-tissue dissolves away into the universe, just as the ordinary thoughts acquired from the world of sense pass away from us. They do not remain. All purely utilitarian thoughts, all thoughts connected with the material world, drift away from us when we pass through the Gate of Death. But the idealistic thoughts and feelings, the pure human love, the religious feelings which have arisen in our waking life and have united us with our Angel, these accompany us when we pass through death.

This has a very important consequence during the period lying between death and a new birth. Even during earthly life we are connected with the higher Hierarchies and it is correct to say that when we fall asleep and our idealistic experiences reach to the Angel, this Angel is in turn connected with the Archangels, the Archangels with the Archai, and so on. Our existence continues in a rich and abundant world of Spirit. But this spiritual world has no special significance for us between birth and death. This world of the higher Hierarchies acquires its real significance for us when it becomes our environment between death and a new birth. The more we have delivered over to our Angel, the more conscious life is this Angel able to infuse into us after death when we are beings of soul-and-spirit, the more gifts are bestowed by the Hierarchies upon the conscious life of soul. What our Angel unfolds, together with the higher Hierarchies (that is to say, what the Beings of the First Hierarchy unfold together with higher Hierarchies through our Angel) is for our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and rebirth what our eyes and ears are in the physical world. And the more idealistic thoughts and feelings, human love and piety we have brought to our Angel, the clearer does our consciousness become.

Now between death and a new birth there comes a time when the Angel has a definite task in connection with us. The Angel has now to achieve a more intimate relation with the hierarchy of the Archangels than was formerly the case. I have described the time through which man lives between death and a new birth from many different points of view, notably in the Lecture-Course given in Vienna in 1914, entitled The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a new Birth. I will now describe certain other aspects.

When a somewhat lengthy period has elapsed after death, the important moment comes when the Angel must as it were deliver up to the Archangels what he has received from us through the ‘idealistic’ experiences described. It is as though man were placed before the world of the Archangels, who can then receive these experiences he has unfolded in his soul and Spirit during his life between birth and death. There are great differences among human souls living between death and a new birth. In our epoch there are persons who have brought very little in the way of idealistic thoughts and feelings, of human love, of piety, when the time comes for the Angel to pass on to the Archangel for the purposes of cosmic evolution, what has been carried through death. This activity which unfolds between the Angel and the Archangel must, under all circumstances, take place. But there is a great difference, dependent upon whether we are able to follow consciously, by means of the experiences described, what takes place between the Angels and the Archangels or whether we only live through it in a dull, dim state, as must be the lot of human beings whose consciousness has been purely materialistic. It is not quite accurate to say that the experiences of such human beings are dull or dim. It is perhaps better to say: they experience these happenings in such a way that they feel continually rejected by a world into which they ought to be received, they feel continually chilled by a world which should receive them with warmth. For man should be received with loving sympathy into the world of the Archangels at this important moment of time; he should be received with warmth. And then he will be led in the right way towards what I have called in one of my Mystery Plays: “The Midnight Hour of Existence.”

Man is led by the Archangels to the realm of the Archai where his life is interwoven with that of all the higher Hierarchies, for through the Archai he is brought into relation with all the higher Hierarchies and receives from their realms the impulse to descend to the Earth once again. The power is given him to work as a being of soul-and-spirit, to work in what is provided, later on, in material form, by the stream of heredity.

Before the Midnight Hour of Existence man has become more and more estranged from earthly existence, he has been growing more and more into the spiritual world—either being received lovingly (in the sense described above) by the spiritual world, being drawn to it with warmth, or being repelled, chilled by it. But when the Midnight Hour of Existence has passed, man begins gradually to long for earthly life and once again, during the second part of his journey, he encounters the world of the Archangels. It is really so: Between death and a new birth, man ascends, first to the world of the Angels, Archangels, Archai, and then once again descends; and after the world of the Archai his most important contact is with the world of the Archangels.

And now comes another important point in the life between death and a new birth. In a man who has brought through death no idealistic thoughts or feelings, no human love or true piety, something of the soul-and-spirit has perished as a result of the antipathy and chilling reception meted out by the higher world. A man who now again approaches the realm of the Archangels in the right way has received into him the power to work effectively in his subsequent life on Earth, to make proper use of his body; a man who has not brought such experiences with him will be imbued by the Angels with a longing for earthly life which remains more unconscious. A very great deal depends upon this. Upon it depends to what people, to what language—mother-tongue—the man descends in his forthcoming earthly existence. This urge towards a particular people, a particular mother-tongue may have been implanted in him deeply and inwardly or more superficially. So that on his descent a man is either permeated with deep and inward love for what will become his mother-tongue, or he enters more automatically into what he will have to express later on through his organs of speech.

It makes a great difference in which of these two ways a man has been destined for the language that will be his in the coming earthly life. He who before his earthly life, during his second passage through the realm of the Angels, can be permeated with a really inward love for his mother-tongue, assimilates it as though it were part of his very being. He becomes one with it. This love is absolutely natural to him; it is a love born of the soul; he grows into his language and race as into a natural home. If however a man has grown into it the other way during the descent to his next earthly life, he will arrive on the Earth loving his language merely out of instinct and lower impulses. Lacking the true, inward love for his language and his people, he will be prone to an aggressive patriotism connected with his bodily existence. It makes a great difference whether we grow into race and language with the tranquil, pure love of one who unites himself inwardly with his folk and language, or whether we grow into them more automatically, and out of passions and instincts express love for our folk and our language. The former conditions never come to expression in chauvinism or a superficial and aggressive form of patriotism. A true and inward love for race and language expresses itself naturally, and is thoroughly consistent with real and universal human love. Feeling for internationalism or cosmopolitanism is never stultified by this inner love for a language and people. When, however, a man grows into his language more automatically, when through his instincts and impulses he develops an over-fervid, organic, animal-like love for language and people, false nationalism and chauvinism arise, with their external emphasis upon race and nationality.

At the present time especially, it is necessary to study from the standpoint of life between death and a new birth what we encounter in the outer world in our life between birth and death. For the way we come down into race and language through the stream of heredity, through birth, depends upon how we encounter, for the second time, the realm of the Archangels.

Those who try to understand life to-day from the spiritual vantage-point, know that the experience arising in the period between death and a new birth when man comes for the second time into the realm of the Angels, is very important. All over the Earth to-day the peoples are adopting a false attitude to nationality, race and language, and much of what has arisen in the catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century in the evolution of the Western people, is only explicable when studied from such points of view. He who studies life to-day in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must assume that in former earthly lives many men became more and more deeply entangled in materialism. You all know that, normally, the period between death and a new birth is lengthy. But especially in the present phase of evolution, there are many men whose life between their last death and their present birth was only short, and in their former earthly life they had little human love or idealism. Already in the former earthly life their interests were merely utilitarian. And as a result, in their second contact with the realm of the Angels between death and a new birth, the seeds were laid for all that arises to-day in such an evil form in the life of the West.

We shall have realised that man can only be understood as a spatial being when it is known that his form and structure derive from the realm of the fixed stars and his life-stages from the planetary spheres. As a spatial being, man draws the forces that are active in him, not only from the Earth but from the whole Cosmos. Now just as it is necessary to go beyond what is earthly in order to understand man as a spatial being, so it is necessary to go beyond life between birth and death in order to understand social life, racial life on the Earth.

When we carefully observe the life of to-day we find that although men claim their right to freedom so vociferously, they are, in reality, inwardly unfree. There is no truly free life in the activities which nowadays manifest such obvious forces of decline; instincts and lower impulses are the cause of the misery in social life. And when this is perceived we are called upon to understand it.

Just as a second meeting with the Archangels takes place, so when man once again approaches earthly life, he enters into a more intimate union with his Angel. But at first he is somewhat withdrawn from the realm of the Angels. As long as he is in the realm of the Archangels, his Angel too is more strongly bound with this realm. Man lives as it were among the higher Hierarchies and as he draws near to a new birth he is entrusted more and more to the realm of the Angels who then lead him through the world of the Elements, through fire, air, water and earth, to the stream of heredity. His Angel, leads him to physical existence on Earth. His Angel can make him into a man who is in a position to act freely, out of the depths of his soul-and-spirit, if all the conditions described have been fulfilled by the achievements of a former earthly life.

But, the Angel is not able to lead a man to a truly free life, if he has had to be united automatically with his language and his race. In such a case the individual life also becomes unfree. This lack of freedom shows itself in the following way. Instead of forming free concepts, such a man merely thinks words. He becomes unfree because all his thinking is absorbed in words. This is a fundamental characteristic of modern men.

Earthly life in its historical development, especially in its present state, cannot be understood unless we also turn with the eyes of soul, to the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, to the world of soul-and-spirit.

To understand the human form, we must turn to the heaven of the fixed stars; to understand the stages of life in man we must turn to the planetary spheres. If we wish to understand man's life of soul-and-spirit, we must not confine our attention to the life between birth and death, for as we have seen, this life of soul-and-spirit is rooted in the world of the higher Hierarchies and belongs to the higher Hierarchies just as the physical body and ether-body of man belong to the physical and etheric worlds.

Again, if we wish to understand thinking, feeling and willing, then we must not merely confine our attention to man's relation to the world of sense. Thinking, feeling and willing are the forces through which the soul develops. We are carried as it were through the Gate of Death by our idealistic thoughts—by what love and religious devotion have implanted in these thoughts. Our first meeting with the Archangels depends upon how we have ennobled our thinking and permeated it with idealism. But when we have passed through the Midnight Hour of Existence, our thinking dies away. It is this thinking which now, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, is re-moulded and elaborated for the next earthly life. And the forces which permeate our physical organs of thinking in the coming earthly life are shaped by our former thinking. The forces working in the human head are not merely forces of the present life. They are the forces which have worked over into this life from thinking as it was in the last life, and give rise to the form of the brain.

On the other hand, it is the will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, plays its special part in man's life of soul-and-spirit. And it is the will which then, in the next life on Earth, lays hold of the limb-and-metabolic organism. When we enter through birth into earthly life, it is the will which determines the fitness or inadequacy of the limbs and the metabolic processes.

Within the head we really have a physical mirror-image of the thoughts evolved in the previous life. In the forces of the metabolism and limbs we have the working of the newly acquired forces of will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, are incorporated into us as I have described—either in such a way that they are inwardly active in the life of soul, or operate automatically.

Those who realise how this present life which generates such forces of decline in humanity of the West, has taken shape, will look with the greatest interest towards what was active in man between death and a new birth during the period of existence preceding this present earthly life. And what they can learn from this will fill them with the impulse—now that the dire consequences of materialism are becoming apparent in the life of the peoples—to give men who already in their last incarnation were too materialistic, that stimulus which can lead once again to a deepening of inner life, to free spiritual activity, to a really intimate, and natural relation to language and race which does not in any way run counter to internationalism or cosmopolitanism.

But first and foremost our thinking must be permeated with real spirituality. In the Spirit of modern man, there are, in reality, only thoughts. When man speaks to-day of his Spirit, he is actually speaking only of his thoughts, of his more or less abstract thinking. What we need is to be filled with Spirit, the living Spirit belonging to the world lying between death and a new birth. In respect of his form, his stages of life, his nature of soul-and-spirit, man must regard himself as belonging to a world which lies outside the earthly sphere; then he will be able to bring what is right and good into earthly life.

We know how the Spiritual in man is gradually absorbed by other domains of earthly existence, by political life, by economic life. What is needed is a free and independent spiritual life; only thereby can man be permeated with real spirituality, with spiritual substance, not merely with thoughts about this or that. Anthroposophy must therefore be prepared to work for the liberation of the spiritual life. If this spiritual life does not stand upon its own foundations, man will become more and more a dealer in abstractions, He will not be able to permeate his being with living Spirit, but only with abstract Spirit.

When a man here, in physical life, passes through the Gate of Death, his corpse is committed to the Earth, or to the Elements. His true being is no longer within this physical corpse. When a man passes through birth in such a way that through the processes described he has become an ‘automaton’ in his relation to his nation, language and conduct—then his living thinking, his living will, his living nature of soul-and-spirit die when he is born into the physical world and within physical existence become the corpse of the Divine Being of soul-and-spirit.

Our abstract, rationalistic thinking is verily a corpse of the soul-and-spirit. Just as the real human being is no longer within the physical corpse, so we have in abstract thinking, a life of soul that is devoid of Spirit—really only the corpse of the Divine-spiritual. Man stands to-day at a critical point where he must resolve to receive the spiritual world once again, in order that he may pour new life into the abstract thinking that is a corpse of the Divine-Spiritual, opening the way for instincts, impulses and automatism.

What I said at the end of my lecture to students here (On the Reality of Higher Worlds. 25th November, 1921.) is deeply true: If he is to pass from a decline to a real ascent, man must overcome the abstraction which, like a corpse of the soul is present in the intellectualistic and rationalistic thinking of to-day.

An awakening of the soul and spirit—that is what is needed! The social life of the present day points clearly to the necessity for such an awakening. Anthroposophy has indeed an eternal task in regard to that living principle in man which must continue beyond all epochs of time. But Anthroposophy has also a task to fulfil for the present age, namely to wean man from externalisation, from the tendency to paralyse and kill the Divine-Spiritual within him. Anthroposophy must bring back this Divine-Spiritual life. Man must learn to regard himself not merely as an earthly but as a heavenly being, realising that his earthly life can only be conducted aright if the forces of heavenly existence, of the existence between death and a new birth, are brought down into this earthly life.

To the outwardly perceptible, visible world there belongs the invisible world, and these, taken together, form a whole. The marked degree to which this is the case first appears in its full clarity when we turn our attention away from the animals to the plants.

Plant-life, as it sprouts and springs forth from the earth, immediately arouses our delight, but it also provides access to something which we must feel as full of mystery. In the case of the animal, though certainly its will and whole inner activity have something of the mysterious, we nevertheless recognize that this will is actually there, and is the cause of the animal's form and outer characteristics. But in the case of the plants, which appear on the face of the earth in such magnificent variety of form, which develop in such a mysterious way out of the seed with the help of the earth and the encircling air—in the case of the plant we feel that some other factor must be present in order that this plant-world may arise in the form it does.

When spiritual vision is directed to the plant-world, we are immediately led to a whole host of beings, which were known and recognized in the old times of instinctive clairvoyance, but which were afterwards forgotten and today remain only as names used by the poet, names to which modern man ascribes no reality. To the same degree, however, in which we deny reality to the beings which whirl and weave around the plants, to that degree do we lose the understanding of the plant-world. This understanding of the plant-world, which, for instance, would be so necessary for the art of healing, has been entirely lost to present-day humanity.

We have already recognized a very significant connection between the world of the plants and the world of the butterflies; but this too will only come rightly before our souls when we look yet more deeply into the whole weaving and working of plant-life.

Plants send down their roots into the ground. Anyone who can observe what they really send down and can perceive the roots with spiritual vision (for this he must have) sees how the root-nature is everywhere surrounded, woven around, by elemental nature spirits. And these elemental spirits, with an old clairvoyant perception designated as gnomes and which we may call the root-spirits, can actually be studied by an imaginative and inspirational world-conception, just as human life and animal life can be studied in the sphere of the physical. We can look into the soul-nature of these elemental spirits, into this world of the spirits of the roots.

These root-spirits, are, so to say, a quite special earth-folk, invisible at first to outer view, but in their effects so much the more visible; for no root could develop if it were not for what is mediated between the root and the earth-realm by these remarkable root-spirits, which bring the mineral element of the earth into flux in order to conduct it to the roots of the plants. Naturally I refer to the underlying spiritual process.

These root-spirits, which are everywhere present in the earth, get a quite particular sense of well-being from rocks and from ores (which may be more or less transparent). But they enjoy their greatest sense of well-being, because here they are really at home, when they are conveying what is mineral to the roots of the plants. And they are completely enfilled with an inner element of spirituality which we can only compare with the inner element of spirituality in the human eye, in the human ear. For these root-spirits are in their spirit-nature entirely sense. Apart from this they are nothing at all; they consist only of sense. They are entirely sense, and it is a sense which is at the same time understanding, which does not only see and hear, but immediately understands what is seen and heard, which in receiving impressions, receives also ideas.

We can even indicate the way in which these root-spirits receive their ideas. We see a plant sprouting out of the earth. The plant comes, as I shall presently show you, into connection with the extraterrestrial universe; and, particularly at certain seasons of the year, spirit-currents flow from above, from the blossom and the fruit of the plant down into the roots below, streaming into the earth. And just as we turn our eyes towards the light and see, so do the root-spirits turn their faculty of perception towards what seeps downwards from above, through the plant into the earth. What seeps down towards the root-spirits, that is something which the light has sent into the blossoms, which the sun's warmth has sent into the plants, which the air has produced in the leaves, which the distant stars have brought about in the plant's structures. The plant gathers the secrets of the universe, sinks them into the ground, and the gnomes take these secrets into themselves from what seeps down spiritually to them through the plants. And because the gnomes, particularly from autumn on and through the winter, in their wanderings through ore and rock bear with them what has filtered down to them through the plants, they become those beings within the earth which, as they wander, carry the ideas of the whole universe streaming throughout the earth. We look forth into the wide world. The world is built from universal spirit; it is an embodiment of universal ideas, of universal spirit. The gnomes receive through the plants, which to them are the same as rays of light are to us, the ideas of the universe, and within the earth carry them in full consciousness from metal to metal, from rock to rock.

We gaze down into the depths of the earth not to seek there below for abstract ideas about some kind of mechanical laws of nature, but to behold the roving, wandering gnomes, which are the light-filled preservers of world-understanding within the earth.

Because these gnomes have immediate understanding of what they see, their knowledge is actually of a similar nature to that of man. They are the compendium of understanding, they are entirely understanding. Everything about them is understanding, an understanding however, which is universal, and which really looks down upon human understanding as something incomplete. The gnomes laugh us to scorn on account of the groping, struggling understanding with which we manage to grasp one thing or another, whereas they have no need at all to make use of thought. They have direct perception of what is comprehensible in the world; and they are particularly ironical when they notice the efforts people have to make to come to this or that conclusion. Why should they do this? say the gnomes—why ever should people give themselves so much trouble to think things over? We know everything we look at. People are so stupid—say the gnomes—for they must first think things over.

And I must say that the gnomes become ironical to the point of ill manners if one speaks to them of logic. For why ever should people need such a superfluous thing—a training in thinking? The thoughts are already there. The ideas flow through the plants. Why don't people stick their noses as deep into the earth as the plant's roots, and let what the sun says to the plants trickle down into their noses? Then they would know something! But with logic—so say the gnomes—there one can only have odd bits and pieces of knowledge.

Thus the gnomes, inside the earth, are actually the bearers of the ideas of the universe, of the world-all. But for the earth itself they have no liking at all. They bustle about in the earth with ideas of the universe, but they actually hate what is earthly. This is something from which the gnomes would best like to tear themselves free. Nevertheless they remain with the earthly—you will soon see why this is—but they hate it, for the earthly threatens them with a continual danger. The earth continually holds over them the threat of forcing them to take on a particular form, the form of those creatures I described to you in the last lecture, the amphibians, and in particular of the frogs and the toads. The feeling of the gnomes within the earth is really this: If we grow too strongly together with the earth, we shall assume the form of frogs or toads. They are continually on the alert to avoid being caught in a too strong connection with the earth, to avoid taking on earthly form. They are always on the defensive against this earthly form, which threatens them as it does because of the element in which they exist. They have their home in the earthly-moist element; there they live under the constant threat of being forced into amphibian forms. From this they continually tear themselves free, by filling themselves entirely with ideas of the extra-terrestrial universe. The gnomes are really that element within the earth which represents the extra-terrestrial, because they must continually reject a growing together with the earthly; otherwise, as single beings, they would take on the forms of the amphibian world. And it is just from what I may call this feeling of hatred, this feeling of antipathy towards the earthly, that the gnomes gain the power of driving the plants up out of the earth. With the fundamental force of their being they unceasingly thrust away the earthly, and it is this thrusting that determines the upward direction of the plant's growth; they push the plants up with them. It accords with the nature of the gnomes in regard to the earthly to allow the plant to have only its roots in the earth, and then to grow upwards out of the earth-sphere; so that it is actually out of the force of their own original nature that the gnomes push the plants out of the earth and make them grow upwards.

Once the plant has grown upwards, once it has left the domain of the gnomes and has passed out of the sphere of the moist-earthly element into the sphere of the moist-airy, the plant develops what comes to outer physical formation in the leaves. But in all that is now active in the leaves other beings are at work, water-spirits, elemental spirits of the watery element, to which an earlier instinctive clairvoyance gave among others the name of undines. Just as we find the roots busied about, woven-about by the gnome-beings in the vicinity of the ground, and observe with pleasure the upward-striving direction which they give, we now see these water-beings, these elemental beings of the water, these undines in their connection with the leaves.

These undine beings differ in their inner nature from the gnomes. They cannot turn like a spiritual sense-organ outwards towards the universe. They can only yield themselves up to the weaving and working of the whole cosmos in the airy-moist element, and therefore they are not beings of such clarity as the gnomes. They dream incessantly, these undines, but their dream is at the same time their own form. They do not hate the earth as intensely as do the gnomes, but they have a sensitivity to what is earthly. They live in the etheric element of water, swimming and swaying through it, and in a very sensitive way they recoil from everything in the nature of a fish; for the fish-form is a threat to them, even if they do assume it from time to time, though only to forsake it immediately in order to take on another metamorphosis. They dream their own existence. And in dreaming their own existence they bind and release, they bind and disperse the substances of the air, which in a mysterious way they introduce into the leaves, as these are pushed upwards by the gnomes. For at this point the plants would wither if it were not for the undines, who approach from all sides, and show themselves, as they weave around the plants in their dream-like existence, to be what we can only call the world-chemists. The undines dream the uniting and dispersing of substances. And this dream, in which the plant has its existence, into which it grows when, developing upwards, it forsakes the ground, this undine-dream is the world-chemist which brings about in the plant-world the mysterious combining and separation of the substances which emanate from the leaf. We can therefore say that the undines are the chemists of plant-life. They dream of chemistry. They possess an exceptionally delicate spirituality which is really in its element just where water and air come into contact with each other. The undines live entirely in the element of moisture, but they develop their actual inner function when they come to the surface of something watery, be it only to the surface of a water-drop or something else of a watery nature. For their whole endeavour lies in preserving themselves from getting the form of a fish, the permanent form of a fish. They wish to remain in a condition of metamorphosis, in a condition of eternal, endlessly changing transformation. But in this state of transformation in which they dream of the stars and of the sun, of light and of warmth, they become the chemists who now, starting from the leaf, carry the plant further in its formation, after it has been pushed upwards by the power of the gnomes. So the plant develops its leaf-growth, and this mystery is now revealed as the dream of the undines into which the plants grow.

To the same degree, however, in which the plant grows into the dream of the undines, does it now come into another domain, into the domain of those spirits which live in the airy-warmth element, just as the gnomes live in the moist-earthly, and the undines in the moist-airy element. Thus it is in the element which is of the nature of air and warmth that those beings live which an earlier clairvoyant art designated as the sylphs. Because air is everywhere imbued with light, these sylphs, which live in the airy-warmth element, press towards the light, relate themselves to it. They are particularly susceptible to the finer but larger movements within the atmosphere.

When in spring or autumn you see a flock of swallows, which produce as they fly vibrations in a body of air, setting an air-current in motion, then this moving air-current—and this holds good for every bird—is for the sylphs something audible. Cosmic music sounds from it to the sylphs. If, let us say, you are travelling somewhere by ship and the seagulls are flying around it, then in what is set in motion by the seagulls' flight there is a spiritual sounding, a spiritual music which accompanies the ship.

Again it is the sylphs which unfold and develop their being within this sounding music, finding their dwelling-place in the moving current of air. It is in this spiritually sounding, moving element of air that they find themselves at home; and at the same time they absorb what the power of light sends into these vibrations of the air. Because of this the sylphs, which experience their existence more or less in a state of sleep, feel most in their element, most at home, where birds are winging through the air. If a sylph is obliged to move and weave through air devoid of birds, it feels as though it had lost itself. But at the sight of a bird in the air something quite special comes over the sylph. I have often had to describe a certain event in man's life, that event which leads the human soul to address itself as “I”. And I have always drawn attention to a saying of Jean Paul, that, when for the first time a human being arrives at the conception of his “I”, it is as though he looks into the most deeply veiled Holy of Holies of his soul. A sylph does not look into any such veiled Holy of Holies of its own soul, but when it sees a bird an ego-feeling comes over it. It is in what the bird sets in motion as it flies through the air that the sylph feels its ego. And because this is so, because its ego is kindled in it from outside, the sylph becomes the bearer of cosmic love through the atmosphere. It is because the sylph embodies something like a human wish, but does not have its ego within itself but in the bird-kingdom, that it is at the same time the bearer of wishes of love through the universe.

Thus we behold the deepest sympathy between the sylphs and the bird-world. Whereas the gnome hates the amphibian world, whereas the undine is unpleasantly sensitive to fishes, is unwilling to approach them, tries to avoid them, feels a kind of horror for them, the sylph, on the other hand, is attracted towards birds, and has a sense of well-being when it can waft towards their plumage the swaying, love-filled waves of the air. And were you to ask a bird from whom it learns to sing, you would hear that its inspirer is the sylph. Sylphs feel a sense of pleasure in the bird's form. They are, however, prevented by the cosmic ordering from becoming birds, for they have another task. Their task is lovingly to convey light to the plant. And just as the undine is the chemist for the plant, so is the sylph the light-bearer. The sylph imbues the plant with light; it bears light into the plant.

Through the fact that the sylphs bear light into the plant, something quite remarkable is brought about in it. You see, the sylph is continually carrying light into the plant. The light, that is to say the power of the sylphs in the plant, works upon the chemical forces which were induced into the plant by the undines. Here occurs the inter-working of sylph-light and undine-chemistry. This is a remarkable plastic activity. With the help of the upstreaming substances which are worked upon by the undines, the sylphs weave out of the light an ideal plant-form. They actually weave the Archetypal Plant within the plant from light, and from the chemical working of the undines. And when towards autumn the plant withers and everything of physical substance disintegrates, then these plant-forms begin to seep downwards, and now the gnomes perceive them, perceive what the world—the sun through the sylphs, the air through the undines—has brought to pass in the plant. This the gnomes perceive, so that throughout the entire winter they are engaged in perceiving below what has seeped into the ground through the plants. Down there they grasp world-ideas in the plant-forms which have been plastically developed with the help of the sylphs, and which now in their spiritual ideal form enter into the ground.

Naturally those people who regard the plant as something purely material know nothing of this spiritual ideal form. Thus at this point something appears which in the materialistic observation of the plant gives rise to what is nothing other than a colossal error, a terrible error. I will sketch this error for you.

Everywhere you will find that materialistic science describes matters as follows: The plant takes root in the ground, above the ground it develops its leaves, finally unfolding its blossoms, within the blossoms the stamens, then the seed-bud. Now—usually from another plant—the pollen from the anthers, from the pollen vessels, is carried over to the germ which is then fructified, and through this the seed of the new plant is produced. The germ is regarded as the female element and what comes from the stamens as the male—indeed matters cannot be regarded otherwise as long as people remain fixed in materialism, for then this process really does look like a fructification. This, however, it is not. In order to gain insight into the process of fructification, that is to say the process of reproduction, in the plant-world, we must be conscious that in the first place it is from what the great chemists, the undines, bring about in the plants, and from what the sylphs bring about, that the plant-form arises, the ideal plant-form which sinks into the ground and is preserved by the gnomes. It is there below, this plant-form. And there within the earth it is now guarded by the gnomes after they have seen it, after they have looked upon it. The earth becomes the mother-womb for what thus seeps downwards. This is something quite different from what is described by materialistic science.

After it has passed through the sphere of the sylphs, the plant comes into the sphere of the elemental fire-spirits. These fire-spirits are the inhabitants of the warmth-light element. When the warmth of the earth is at its height, or is otherwise suitable, they gather the warmth together. Just as the sylphs gather up the light, so do the fire-spirits gather up the warmth and carry it into the blossoms of the plants.

Undines carry the action of the chemical ether into the plants, sylphs the action of the light-ether into the plant's blossoms. And the pollen now provides what may be called little air-ships, to enable the fire-spirits to carry the warmth into the seed. Everywhere warmth is collected with the help of the stamens, and is carried by means of the pollen from the anthers to the seeds and the seed vessels. And what is formed here in the seed-bud is entirely the male element which comes from the cosmos. It is not a case of the seed-vessel being female and the anthers of the stamens being male. In no way does fructification occur in the blossom, but only the pre-forming of the male seed. The fructifying force is what the fire-spirits in the blossom take from the warmth of the world-all as the cosmic male seed, which is united with the female element. This element, drawn from the forming of the plant has, as I told you, already earlier seeped down into the ground as ideal form, and is resting there below. For plants the earth is the mother, the heavens the father. And all that takes place outside the domain of the earth is not the mother-womb for the plant. It is a colossal error to believe that the mother-principle of the plant is in the seed-bud. The fact is that this is the male-principle, which is drawn forth from the universe with the aid of the fire-spirits. The mother comes from the cambium, which spreads from the bark to the wood, and is carried down from above as ideal form. And what now results from the combined working of gnome-activity and fire-spirit activity—this is fructification. The gnomes are, in fact, the spiritual midwives of plant-reproduction. Fructification takes place below in the earth during the winter, when the seed comes into the earth and meets with the forms which the gnomes have received from the activities of the sylphs and undines and now carry to where these forms can meet with the fructifying seeds.

You see, because people do not recognize what is spiritual, do not know how gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-spirits—which were formerly called salamanders—weave and live together with plant-growth, there is complete lack of clarity about the process of fructification in the plant world. There, outside the earth nothing of fructification takes place, but the earth is the mother of the plant-world, the heavens the father. This is the case in a quite literal sense. Plant-fructification takes place through the fact that the gnomes take from the fire-spirits what the fire-spirits have carried into the seed bud as concentrated cosmic warmth on the little airships of the anther-pollen. Thus the fire-spirits are the bearers of warmth.

And now you will easily gain insight into the whole process of plant-growth. First, with the help of what comes from the fire-spirits, the gnomes down below instill life into the plant and push it upwards. They are the fosterers of life. They carry the life-ether to the root—the same life-ether in which they themselves live. The undines foster the chemical ether, the sylphs the light-ether, the fire-spirits the warmth ether. And then the fruit of the warmth-ether again unites with what is present below as life. Thus the plants can only be understood when they are considered in connection with all that is circling, weaving and living around them. And one only reaches the right interpretation of the most important process in the plant when one penetrates into these things in a spiritual way.

When once this has been understood, it is interesting to look again at that memorandum of Goethe's where, referring to another botanist, he is so terribly annoyed because people speak of the eternal marriage in the case of the plants above the earth. Goethe is affronted by the idea that marriages should be taking place over every meadow. This seemed to him something unnatural. In this Goethe had an instinctive but very true feeling. He could not as yet know the real facts of the matter, nevertheless he instinctively felt that fructification should not take place above in the blossom. Only he did not as yet know what goes on down below under the ground, he did not know that the earth is the mother-womb of the plants. But, that the process which takes place above in the blossom is not what all botanists hold it to be, this is something which Goethe instinctively felt.

You are now aware of the inner connection between plant and earth. But there is something else which you must take into account.

You see, when up above the fire-spirits are circling around the plant and transmitting the anther-pollen, then they have only one feeling, which they have in an enhanced degree, compared to the feeling of the sylphs. The sylphs experience their self, their ego, when they see the birds flying about. The fire-spirits have this experience, but to an intensified degree, in regard to the butterfly-world, and indeed the insect-world as a whole. And it is these fire-spirits which take the utmost delight in following in the tracks of the insects' flight so that they may bring about the distribution of warmth for the seed buds. In order to carry the concentrated warmth, which must descend into the earth so that it may be united with the ideal form, in order to do this the fire-spirits feel themselves inwardly related to the butterfly-world, and to the insect-creation in general. Everywhere they follow in the tracks of the insects as they buzz from blossom to blossom. And so one really has the feeling, when following the flight of insects, that each of these insects as it buzzes from blossom to blossom, has a quite special aura which cannot be entirely explained from the insect itself. Particularly the luminous, wonderfully radiant, shimmering, aura of bees, as they buzz from blossom to blossom, is unusually difficult to explain. And why? It is because the bee is everywhere accompanied by a fire-spirit which feels so closely related to it that, for spiritual vision, the bee is surrounded by an aura which is actually a fire-spirit. When a bee flies through the air from plant to plant, from tree to tree, it flies with an aura which is actually given to it by a fire-spirit. The fire-spirit does not only gain a feeling of its ego in the presence of the insect, but it wishes to be completely united with the insect.

Through this, however, insects also obtain that power about which I have spoken to you, and which shows itself in a shimmering forth of light into the cosmos. They obtain the power completely to spiritualize the physical matter which unites itself with them, and to allow the spiritualized physical substance to ray out into cosmic space. But just as with a flame it is the warmth in the first place which causes the light to shine, so, above the surface of the earth, when the insects shimmer forth into cosmic space what attracts the human being to descend again into physical incarnation, it is the fire spirits which inspire the insects to this activity, the fire-spirits which are circling and weaving around them. But if the fire-spirits are active in promoting the outstreaming of spiritualized matter into the cosmos, they are no less actively engaged in seeing to it that the concentrated fiery element, the concentrated warmth, goes into the interior of the earth, so that, with the help of the gnomes, the spirit-form, which sylphs and undines cause to seep down into the earth, may be awakened.

This, you see, is the spiritual process of plant-growth. And it is because the subconscious in man divines something of a special nature in the blossoming, sprouting plant that he experiences the being of the plant as full of mystery. The wonder is not spoiled, the magic is not brushed from the dust on the butterfly's wing. Rather is the instinctive delight in the plant raised to a higher level when not only the physical plant is seen, but also that wonderful working of the gnome-world below, with its immediate understanding and formative intelligence, the gnome-world which first pushes the plant upwards. Thus, just as human understanding is not subjected to gravity, just as the head is carried without our feeling its weight, so the gnomes with their light-imbued intellectuality overcome what is of the earth and push the plant upwards. Down below they prepare the life. But the life would die away were it not formed by chemical activity. This is brought to it by the undines. And this again must be imbued with light. And so we picture, from below upwards, in bluish, blackish shades the force of gravity, to which the impulse upwards is given by the gnomes; and weaving around the plant—indicated by the leaves—the undine-force blending and dispersing substances as the plant grows upwards. From above downwards, from the sylphs, light falls into the plants and shapes an idealized plastic form which descends, and is taken up by the mother-womb of the earth; moreover this form is circled around by the fire-spirits which concentrate the cosmic warmth into the tiny seed-points. This warmth is also sent downwards to the gnomes, so that from out of fire and life, they can cause the plants to arise.

And further we now see that essentially the earth is indebted for its power of resistance and its density to the antipathy of the gnomes and undines towards amphibians and fishes. If the earth is dense, this density is due to the antipathy by means of which the gnomes and undines maintain their form. When light and warmth sink down on to the earth, this is first due to that power of sympathy, that sustaining power of sylph-love, which is carried through the air, and then to the sustaining sacrificial power of the fire-spirits, which causes them to incline downwards to what is below themselves. So we may say that, over the face of the earth, earth-density, earth-magnetism and earth-gravity, in their upward-striving aspect, unite with the downward-striving power of love and sacrifice. And in this inter-working of the downwards streaming force of love and sacrifice and the upwards streaming force of density, gravity and magnetism, in this inter-working, where the two streams meet, plant-life develops over the earth's surface. Plant-life is an outer expression of the inter-working of world-love and world-sacrifice with world-gravity and world-magnetism.

From this you have seen with what we have to do when we direct our gaze to the plant-world, which so enchants, uplifts and inspires us. Here real insight can only be gained when our vision embraces the spiritual, the super-sensible, as well as what is accessible to the physical senses. This enables us to correct the capital error of materialistic botany, that fructification occurs above the earth. What occurs there is not the process of fructification, but the preparation of the male heavenly seed for what is being made ready as the future Plant in the mother-womb of the earth.